By: David Mastrella
Publish Date: Thursday 8/22/2019
A century from today when someone writes the evolution of technology, the invention of machine learning will undoubtedly be acknowledged as a significant milestone.
What’s machine learning (ML)?
ML is an application of artificial intelligence that provides your computer with the ability to automatically learn from data without being programmed.
Despite being the gateway to deriving value from customer data, the vast majority of business executives struggle to understand how ML will propel their businesses to new heights.
Wondering what value machine learning brings to business and what its future looks like? Read on.
1. Builds Data Fabric
Despite data being the engine of modern day businesses, many investors don’t highly regard data.
The only time such investors realize that data is an asset is when a disastrous data breach occurs. At that point, data becomes their most valuable data.
One of the main benefits of deploying ML solutions is the creation of data fabric. What’s a data fabric? It’s an eco-system that offers seamless well-controlled information integration within your business.
If your business lacks an efficient data fabric, valuable information may end up being stuck in silos. This means you’ll never get an opportunity to organize, democratize and monetize the data to the fullest.
Without this function, ML would just be ‘garbage-in garbage-out’ practice. Such practice results in dangerously erroneous decision-making with unfavorable customer experience.
2. Helps Your Business Recruit the Right Talent
The Integration of ML in the hiring and recruiting process has enabled businesses to attract the right talent.
What's the benefit of data-driven recruitment process? It helps you remove incompetent candidates early in the recruitment process.
ML has real-time reporting functions that measure skill and performance among candidates. This makes the talent pool smaller in the early stages of the recruitment process. Therefore, it reduces the time spent on the recruitment process.
With the right benchmarks, recruiters can easily identify candidates who don’t meet your expectations. This will allow them to focus on those matching the set metrics.
ML has also made the recruitment process efficient. It has freed HR managers and recruiters from the hassle of performing repetitive tasks.
Instead, this tool enables them to concentrate on responsibilities that add value to your business.
At the same time, ML solutions automate the hiring processes. This means there is minimal human intervention within this process. It also promotes significant candidate engagement to positively influence the quality of hires.
3. Predictive Maintenance
Do you know that manufacturing companies are required to observe preventive and corrective maintenance routines? These routines are usually expensive and inefficient.
But, with the advent of ML, businesses in this sector can utilize ML to discover beneficial insights.
Your factory data might have important data that's not being utilized. ML infrastructure can be built using a flexible analysis environment, workflow visualization tool, and feedback loop. This will reduce unnecessary expenses and the risks associated with unexpected failures.
4. Improving marketing Strategy
ML can generate a huge amount of data in real-time that can be helpful in creating a marketing strategy.
You can use the data obtained from customer behavior analysis to make necessary changes to your marketing strategy.
Do you run a retail business? ML has models equipped with image detection software that can be extended to your customers. This application helps customers to easily find the products they’re looking for.
5. Helps with Financial Management.
Fraudulent transactions have proven to be a major challenge in the business sector today. Some businesses have dedicated an entire department to detect frauds in their companies. This is a costly undertaking.
With the help of ML, you can easily predict and detect fraud by utilizing cognitive computing technologies.
In your monetary portfolio, you can rely on ML for investment predictions and risk management.
6. Improves Business Models and Services
While large companies flourish by dominating the market share, small businesses have to seek competitive advantage in other domains to remain in business.
For you to remain competitive, you need to come up with innovative models.
For example, businesses that are founded on disruptive technology heavily depend on ML from day one of their operations. ML empowers these businesses to guarantee high customer satisfaction.
However, the benefits of ML are not only limited to small and medium businesses. The same models can be utilized by established organizations considering the prolific use cases of ML solutions.
7. Enhances Cyber Security
Do you know how many network anomalies, intrusions, and cyber-security threats your business suffers in a day?
To maintain network security, you need to proactively identify any unwelcomed networking behavior. Otherwise, it can escalate into a significant security attack, data leak, and downtime.
ML algorithms help you monitor network behavior and quickly identify anomalies in real time. After anomalies have been detected, the ML system automatically executes proactive measures. Since ML algorithms self-train, it will boost your company’s network security.
It will also help your business adapt to change within its network.
Forecasts for the Future of Machine Learning
There are unlimited possibilities when it comes to the future of ML. Here’s a couple of near term predictions.
Most Business Solutions Will Use ML
In less than a decade, ML will become part of almost every business solution. The benefits of ML are likely to extend to the domestic sphere.
There will be a high level of personalization that will further improve the customer’s experience. With algorithms, businesses can synthesize the content in data and come up with correct conclusions, such as a customer’s interests.
Rise of Robots
As ML is becoming more advanced, you’ll see increased use of robots in businesses and also homes.
Did you know robotization relies on machine learning? ML helps it achieve various goals, including self-supervised learning and robot vision.
The Future of Machine learning is Bright
The above forecasts have just opened the lid of what could be practical when it comes to machine learning.
The future of machine learning promises a day when computers will learn to communicate effortlessly without the need for code. Computers will no longer be having difficulties understanding human language.
In the coming years, you’re likely to see more sophisticated applications that will stretch ML’s capabilities to unimaginable heights.
Looking for additional insightful articles and blogs about current trends in technology? We've got more!