When Machines and People Work Together PaymentsJournal

There are times when the terms used to describe technologies just don't tell the entire story. Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are two recent examples. A topic of countless news stories and plenty of futuristic speculation, machine learning and AI are often used as the main characters in scary dystopian tales of robots that gain self-awareness and then use their powerful computer brains to take over the world. That's fine as fodder for science fiction tales, but it also can serve as a major (not to mention unnecessary and untrue) obstacle to harnessing the legitimate power of AI and machine learning to solve real-life business challenges today. Put another way, machine learning and AI have an image problem – one that the technologies can't solve for themselves because, well, they're not the omnipotent robots of our imaginations.