AI used to take up quite a bit of processing power, a long time ago. In the later stages of Civ it could take up to a minute for the computer to finish it's turn on a 286. Path finding in baldur's gate was dumb as rocks, cause the search depth was set very low to save cpu cycles.
Some games are still limited by the exponential increase in path finding difficulty. The AI in Sim city 2013 works with a very simplified system which is responsible for the dumb traffic behavior. It's not that difficult to write an optimal distributed path finding solution, but the cpu cost increases exponentially with grid size and number of actors. Pretty much the same as trying to calculate the next move in Go.
AI so far is either a clever set of decision rules (cheap but predictable), or brute force determining the best move out of all current possibilities (very expensive or otherwise dumb) It's 2014 and Dark souls 2 enemies still have the same predictable behavior (intentional to keep it playable) but also plenty of exploits due to the pathing algorithm. We're still not at a stage where AI characters can move around naturally. (To be fair, neither do human controlled characters)
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