I also find AI very interesting. During an expert systems uni course a while ago we looked at several very 'budget' expert system generation utilities such as 'First Class', 'Level 5' and probably a better one 'Prolog' etc.. they each cost tens of thousands of dollars in most cases, but are very primitive for tackling REAL issues.

Perhaps expert system development could be an option. There are several AI modules around but I doubt any from what I have seen can provide full expert system generation or perhaps trained and untrained neural network creation, jNeural looks like it might one day - but not yet.