AI, Machine Learning and their role in Automation

Very thoughtfully done piece.   Its not all about Machine Learning.  ML is usually just a focused element of the overall goal.  A key question that should be asked: What is the local definition of automation?  How is it embedded in the existing process?  Automating means we have defined what we want of the overall process.

How to think about AI and machine learning technologies, and their roles in automation
An overview and framework, including tools that can be used to enable automation.  By Ben Lorica   in O'Reilly

In this post, I share slides and notes from a talk Roger Chen and I gave in May 2018 at the Artificial Intelligence Conference in New York. Most companies are beginning to explore how to use machine learning and AI, and we wanted to give an overview and framework for how to think about these technologies and their roles in automation. Along the way, we describe the machine learning and AI tools that can be used to enable automation.

Let me begin by citing a recent survey we conducted: among other things, we found that a majority (54%) consider deep learning an important part of their future projects. Deep learning is a specific machine learning technique, and its success in a variety of domains has led to the renewed interest in AI.

Much of the current media coverage about AI revolves around deep learning. The reality is that many AI systems will use many different machine learning methods and techniques. For example, recent prominent examples of AI systems—systems that excelled at Go and Poker—used deep learning and other methods. In the case of AlphaGo, Monte Carlo Tree Search played a role, whereas DeepStack’s poker playing system combines neural networks with counterfactual regret minimization and heuristic search.  .... "