We Are the Robots: SAP Moves Ahead with Machine Learning

One day we will "think about machine learning the way we think about electricity: It's hard to imagine the world without it," said SAP Chief Innovation Officer Juergen Mueller at the recent SAP TechEd Barcelona. Under Mueller, SAP has embarked on a journey to bring machine learning to business around the world, essentially "electrifying" all applications with this technology. For the uninitiated, machine learning takes Big Data, runs it against sophisticated algorithms and helps applications to learn from this information. Massively improved computing power makes this possible in real time. Most importantly, it allows applications to "think" and independently resolve problems – going beyond what they were explicitly programmed to do, and often what humans can do.