I, myself, am currently a student concentrating in computational intelligence. From what I learned, to build an AI you need to comprehend ways to process the data. For example, If you wanna make an AI that can detect a cancer by analyzing the microscopic cell images then you need to make a computer program with pattern recognition combined with computer vision. There are algorithm like K-nearest neighbors, naive bayes, LDA, and PCA, In pattern recognition itself.
My advice, try to develop an expert system first. Get to know how the flow works. FYI, an expert system is a system made for decision making. For example, an expert system that determines wether someone worth given scholarships based on the user’s input. The core of expert system is its inference engine. You can google it for further information.