Does your business need to invest in machine learning? Here’s how you can decide

These days, everyone’s getting in on machine learning. It’s definitely a great direction to pursue for many businesses since it gives them the ability to deliver tremendous value in a fairly quick and easy way.

The demand for machine learning skills is at an all-time high. There’s a nice comprehensive report by McKinsey & Company about how AI is shaping industries and where the opportunities are.

The supply greatly outweighs the demand in AI and machine learning.

And so, we see every business around say: “Hey, we need a machine learning research team really quick! We’ll get the best scientists with lots of publications and pay them lots of money so we can get some machine learning in our business. Hooray!”

But wait just a minute. As a business, do you really need a machine learning research team? Will your business even use them effectively for today’s high price? How much do you even need machine learning at all? And if you’re more of a technical person, do you go full throttle on learning how to do machine learning research?

To answer these questions, we need to differentiate between the two ways we can really work with the technology: research and application.

Machine learning research

Machine learning research is really all about the science. A machine learning researcher tries to push the boundaries of science, specifically in the field of AI. These people typically have a master’s degree or a PhD in computer science and have many publications in top machine learning conferences. They’re super popular in the research space!

Hiring a machine learning researcher can be fantastic if you’re doing something really cutting-edge. These people are used to finding custom scientific solutions to problems. If you were to tell them, “We’re really good at automatically detecting human intruders using face recognition with 95 percent accuracy. Could you get us up to 97 percent?” the machine learning researcher is your go-to guy.

Machine learning researchers know this stuff.

Here’s the catch: This person likely hasn’t ever deployed software into production. They probably aren’t experts at delivering SaaS products to your customers. They wouldn’t know how to properly package, productize, and ship.

And that’s where this next guy comes in.

Machine learning application

Machine learning application is all about the engineering. A machine learning engineer knows how to take the latest machine learning research and translate it into a valuable product or service. These people are very good with cloud computing services such as AWS or GCP.

How to use machine learning in your business