What is Machine Learning

Firms that keep pace with machine learning will forge a brighter path to innovation and success, rather than playing catch-up later.

Picture a world where your machines have the ability to detect exactly who you are through facial recognition, pinpoint what your next purchases will be via product recommendations, and your navigation systems pick-up traffic congestions in real-time. These are only a handful of the outcomes shaped by machine learning (ML). Below I’ll dive deeper into the impacts of ML and it’s tremendous potential to transform the enterprise.

What is Machine Learning?

Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) that provides systems the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience – much the same way humans do.

There are many subsets of machine learning, such as deep learning which is a sophisticated (and complex!) way of analyzing massive amounts of data to help solve problems that were previously impossible to solve. There’s also natural language processing that enables software to understand and even detect the nuances of human speech.

Machine Learning is vast and powerful and has paved the way for remarkable inventions:

• self-driving cars
• recommendation engines (like Netflix)
• speech recognition
• enhanced web search
• credit card fraud detection and more

Research from IDC forecasts that spending on AI and machine learning will grow from $12B in 2017 to $57.6B by 2021. Industry leaders, like Walmart, are even using machine learning to transform retail operations and customer experience.

For example, they are optimizing the delivery routes of their home deliveries and using facial recognition technology to pin-point dissatisfied customers. Social media giant Facebook also leverages the powerful capabilities of machine learning for its News Feed feature, using statistical analysis and predictive analytics to personalize each member’s feed.

Why Machine Learning Matters

Machine Learning helps you understand, unify, categorize, and simplify your data. This is BIG for businesses that handle multiple data sets that are scattered across different sources.

Here’s the impact of machine learning on today’s business:

• Advanced algorithms can learn, identify, and predict your business outcomes.
• Predictive analytics forecast the success of new product offerings based on specific customer profiles.
• Productivity, efficiency, processes, and workflows are improved using intelligent automation.
• A more personalized experience through learning from customer interactions with the organization.

But how do you get to reap these rewards? One solution to conquering your data is investing in data scientists and machine learning engineers (part analysts/part geniuses who use their analytical and technical abilities to extract insights from massive data sets).

Machine Learning is Better for Business

While there are several benefits to machine learning, it also has its caveats, such as the time needed to truly understand its impact on your business and broader implications. Once you conquer your hesitations, I guarantee that the realm of possibilities for your business will be infinite.

We suggest discussing your objectives with an experienced data science professional and conduct a thorough data gap analysis to understand the state of your organization’s data infrastructure in order to set your expectations appropriately.

Machine learning is not magic, but with the right planning and hard work upfront, it can certainly perform wonders!

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