In vivo imaging of brain amyloid using positron emission tomography (PET) scanning is widely used in research studies of dementia, with three amyloid PET ligands being licenced for clinical use. The main clinical use of PET is to help confirm or exclude the likely diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease in challenging cases, where diagnostic uncertainty remains after current clinical and investigative work up. Whilst diagnostically valuable in such select cases, much wider clinical adoption, especially for very early disease, will be limited by both cost and the lack of a currently effective disease-modifying treatment that requires such early case identification. The use of amyloid imaging to appropriately stratify subjects for prognostic studies and therapeutic trials should increase the efficiency and potentially shorten the time of such studies, and its use combined with other biomarkers and genetics will likely lead to new ways of defining and classifying the dementias.