Jim Scapa has been chairman and CEO of Altair Engineering for 12 years, but he's having difficulty getting others at the Troy, Michigan-based design and development engineering company to grasp the importance of machine learning. "I've suggested using it for a couple of things here recently but got persuaded otherwise," he says. "But I still think I'm right, and I'm really persistent." What Scapa recognizes is that machine learning "leverages the fact that there' s a huge amount of computing available to try to solve problems, predict the future and prescribe solutions." Indeed, Big Data is revolutionizing business, much as the Internet began doing a quarter-century ago, and machine learning is emerging as one of the most important tools for utilizing it.