Three Terms, One Persistent Confusion Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Data Science are three of the most frequently used, and three of the most consistently conflated, terms in technology today. Job descriptions blend them interchangeably. News articles use them as synonyms. Even within organisations, teams labelled differently are sometimes doing work that is functionally indistinguishable. The confusion is understandable. The three fields overlap substantially, share tooling and mathematical foundations, and have converged further in recent years as data-driven methods have come to dominate AI research. But they are not the same thing, and treating them as such leads to poor hiring decisions, misdirected research investment, and architectural choices that do…