The Rise of Human-Machine Collaboration

Tom Davenport [TD]: The tremendous rise in the application of machine learning (ML), I think, is the biggest driver of change. While ML isn’t really new overall, we can do a lot more of it because we have a lot more data that we can use to train the ML models. Deep learning algorithms are also relatively new, and they do some things really well that couldn’t be done before, things like image recognition and voice and text analysis. In some ways, we have just achieved critical mass. For whatever reason, expert systems never really achieved critical mass, and the field went into another AI winter. While a recession, which we seem to be headed for, could diminish the amount of startup activity related to AI, I don’t think it’s going to lead to any sort of AI winter. I think we’re at the point where there’s no turning back.