How to Spot a Machine Learning Opportunity, Even If You Aren't a Data Scientist

Having an intuition for how machine learning algorithms work -- even in the most general sense -- is becoming an important business skill. As Andrew Ng has written: "Almost all of AI's recent progress is through one type, in which some input data (A) is used to quickly generate some simple response (B)." But how does this work? As you might imagine, many exciting machine learning problems can't be reduced to a simple equation like y mx b. But at their essence, supervised machine learning algorithms are solving for complex versions of m, based on labeled values for x and y, so that they can predict future y's from future x's.