Are we ready for Alexa for IT?

Even as Siri and Alexa slip quietly into the flow of our lives and we watch IBM's Watson play Jeopardy! Marketers play on this to draw attention, declaring in intentionally stark blog posts that "AI is better than humans" and it "really is going to take people's jobs." We can speculate, we can worry, we can ponder the defeat of humanity in the face of AI, but that focuses on provocative possibilities, not the reality. To understand the potential for machine learning, we must stop obsessing about the forest and sharpen our focus on the trees. On a macro level, there's no doubt that machine learning will reduce the need for manual labor across many industries and roles, including the maintenance aspects of IT.