Well, first, I would try to understand what "AI" you are talking about and why you have so much confidence it will be big.

It's a pretty broad category, and a lot of it is (still) very far from commercialization.

It's almost like asking about "the Internet" in 1992.

Here are some categories that may help to dive into...

-Computer Vision

-Natural Language Processing

AClustering vs classification in machine learning

-Neural nets (convolutional, recursive, hyerparameters and optimizTion techniques)

Read "how to create a Mind" by kurtzweil

Related (but distinct topics)

-Understand rise (and fall) of semantic web

-Open/Linked data

-Relational vs NoSql databases

-distributed/parallel processing (MapReduce ->hadoop-> spark)

*edit - typo