[Tuna-Fish]

There's stupendous profit in every small incremental step towards it. AI research in general has proven to be unbelievably profitable -- even when you fail in your goals (like most AI research to date), every minor partial result can probably be turned into a multimillion business.

Before the AI winter, there was a lot of criticism of how the US govt spent a lot of money on a lot of projects which fizzled out. One of the results built from the ashes of those DARPA projects was the Dynamic Analysis and Replanning Tool, used to optimize and schedule transportation of supplies and personnel.

From wikipedia: Introduced in 1991, DART had by 1995 offset the monetary equivalent of all funds DARPA had channeled into AI research for the previous 30 years combined.