What a CEO needs to know about Machine Learning algorithms

During my first project in McKinsey in 2011, I served the CEO of a bank regarding his small business strategy. I wanted to run a linear regression on the bank's data but my boss told me: "Don't do it. Artificial Intelligence is the most general-purpose technology of our time. New products and processes are being developed thanks to better vision systems, speech recognition technologies or recommendation engines based on Machine Learning. In fact, most recent advances in Artificial Intelligence have been achieved in the area of Machine Learning. Long before McKinsey, in 2004, I started my career as a mobile software developer. At that time I had to write precise instructions for every step of my code. Developing the voice recognition system of today's phones would have been tedious and error-prone back then. It would have required literally hundreds of thousands of detailed instructions to codify every single step, including identifying phonemes from sound waves, grouping them into ...