Artificial intelligence is the new digital divide – Enrique Dans

An article in Wired, "Google, Facebook and Microsoft are remaking themselves around AI", highlights a topic I've been discussing for a long time now: the efforts technology giants are making to educate their employees at all levels by incorporating talent and developing new products based on machine learning and artificial intelligence in order to change how they organize and operate their businesses. In a very short time, we have gone from the AI Winter and seeing these types of technologies as something out of science fiction to finding ourselves in the middle of a rapidly changing reality with advances appearing each day to the point that the development of this type of technology and its application to more and more areas is beginning to create a digital divide between the companies that have it and those that do not. From the viewpoint of a business school, the phenomenon can be clearly seen: the demand for executives able to understand this area is increasing, reflected by increased demand for courses related to the subject from year to year, while such content is incorporated into virtually all programs at all levels, from a simple understanding of the concepts to analysis at the highest level. Several of the entrants in this field seem to have a reasonably clear strategy to develop machine learning platforms and to offer them to third parties through Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS). In this context, which I follow with great interest given my work as a strategic advisor at BigML, are large companies like Amazon (its traditional strategy, develop any service, be it logistics, cloud computing or whatever, and open it to others), Microsoft, IBM, Facebook and Google, to smaller companies that are usually faster and more agile at product development.