An executive's guide to machine learning

This article was written by Dorian Pyle and Cristina San Jose on McKinsey&Company. Dorian Pyle is a data expert in McKinsey's Miami office, and Cristina San Jose is a principal in the Madrid office. It's no longer the preserve of artificial-intelligence researchers and born-digital companies like Amazon, Google, and Netflix. Machine learning is based on algorithms that can learn from data without relying on rules-based programming. It came into its own as a scientific discipline in the late 1990s as steady advances in digitization and cheap computing power enabled data scientists to stop building finished models and instead train computers to do so.