Don't Buy Machine Learning

During a conversation I had with Peter Norvig, we discussed about the kind of projects that we do at Machinalis and how strange does it feels to say that "we are a Machine Learning company": In many projects, the amount of effort spent on R&D on Machine Learning is usually a small fraction of the total effort, or it's not even there because we plan it for a future phase after building the application first. "Machine Learning development is like the raisins in a raisin bread: 1. You need the bread first 2. It's just a few tiny raisins but without it you would just have plain bread." A large company, at a higher level, decides to move away from standard tools, given that "our business and our data are different/peculiar", incorporating Machine Learning or Data Science into their processes. In these situations they call us just to get some raisins.