The history of the software industry is one of automating repetitive human processes. It started in finance and has spread more or less across all aspects of business and society. But that was largely a case of humans telling computers what to do and letting them get on with it by following rules. Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) change all that, since the technologies can learn the best way to achieve something and continue to improve, augmented by human intelligence and effort.
AI is something 451 Research has been covering since 2001, starting with a focus on machine learning-driven text analytics to identify text in large data sets for intelligence purposes and branching out from there. Now with machine learning becoming embedded in all major business applications and automating tasks and processes within them, we believe that any applications that don’t use it will ultimately fail. But the AI market is bigger than the technology industry as we know it now; it spans all types of manufacturing and services.