Twenty years ago, if someone said a machine would heavily influence your day, you might have thought you were listening to futuristic nonsense. However, today, this is precisely what’s happening. Almost everything you do and see has been determined by machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence that uses past data to predict future behavior. Many successful companies have started creating custom AI algorithms that help them perform their tasks faster and more efficiently. Some find this unnerving, while others embrace the intuitive and useful nature of it. But how much does machine learning really affect your life? Here are just three of the ways you come into contact with it every day.
Speech Recognition
Every time you speak a command to a virtual agent, it uses machine learning to identify the words you’re saying, translate them into a request and determine what it is you’re likely asking and, using your past search history, location, and the order of the words you’ve used, will come back to you with what it deems to be a valid response. Over time, as you create more searches and feed more data into your agent, it’s response will become more tailored to you – which is why it can sometimes feel like it answers you before you even finish asking a question.
Business Forecasting
With the reams of data that businesses produce today, coupled with all the external data sources they pull from, there’s too much information for a humble human brain to compute, interrogate and interpret. Machine learning tools can do all of that and more in a matter of minutes and present you with a concise model of how you should move forward using the insights to profitably benefit your business. In real-time, they respond to the market, consumer demand, and trends to continually evolve and produce detailed data-driven forecasting to shape your strategy.
Customer Purchasing Behavior
Have you ever browsed online and then come out of that website and, not long after, seen an advert about the things you were looking at? While it can be extremely awkward if you happen to have been looking for someone’s birthday or Christmas present and they are the next person to use the computer, it has been proven to significantly improve sales when you gently nudge someone into returning to your website to complete a purchase. This is machine learning, where a customer’s past behavior is tracked, analyzed, and then used to determine the content they see in the future.
Your business’s future depends on you being able to predict it. Forecasting tools should be at the forefront of the decisions you make and the strategies you implement. Don’t get left behind; integrate forecasting into your business today.
