Well. In the game lore, humanity has already reached the stars and developed tech that's even FASTER than hyperspace (the currently broken down gates). Many of their expansion efforts were pioneered by autonomous drones, utilizing the early ages of general purpose artificial intelligence. So by default, general purpose AI already exists. Trytachyon took things further, creating tech that matched the human brain. After reaching human intelligence, it's not a huge leap to surpass it by making the same thing but bigger. That led to a whole bunch of AI wars, spawning a few video games of the same name and shaping the current sector in game.
As fun as it is to wank humanity's superiority, this sci fi world explicitly states that a smart enough AI is superior to human intelligence. Even the dumbest ones are better at math of course, but the superior ones can analyze much stranger data such as fads, market predictions and design algorithms to both make better decisions and ultimately provide better administration than a human possibly can.