Yeah, I know what you mean. However, you'll find that everyone here's been in the same boat at one time or another.

I'm actually a noobie when it comes to AI, it's one of the major tasks I've got left on my game... thing is, I'm leaving it until I've got a complete understanding of what I need to do... which means finalizing some of the currently fluid ideas I've got at the moment.

But it's safe to say that the final AI system will have a lot of useful things inside which may be portable to other applications.

Path Finding.
the actual laying of the path for a sprite/drone to follow.

Path Following
Moving the sprite from one node to the next in a series of pre-defined nodes.. this can also include additional path finding to get from one node to another in a more accurate way..

Rules System
Based on various inputs, decide the best output.
I'm not entirely sure how to do this. I've seen rule bases alg's written using a simple list which is parsed each turn. Some of the items in the list have wildcard flags against the inputs. Rules are punished or praised depending on the result so eventually, according to the theory, only the most successful rules should be executed.
I think the hard part will be determining which of the inputs are actually relevant to the rule and whether it should be punished or not.

but then, my game is pretty complex.. even though from the outside it looks simple.