My interest in AI is purely practical. The fist reason (very generic) is that I am (nearly) a lone contributor on a project that grew large. I have been using every trick in the book to make my code more abstract and manageable by one person. The next step in code reduction requires declarative programming (aka Prolog, though doesn't have to be) which requires deductive reasoning, which is a major topic of AI.

The second reason (more specific) is that I need to use an ontology (stored as a database) which is basically another topic of AI.