Machine learning: the time is now
Alphabet has just announced Google’s latest quarterly results, which show increased turnover and profits on the previous year and that have been welcomed by the markets, pushing the company’s share price to above 700.
Since Google’s transformation into a company within Alphabet’s holding, Sundar Pichai has played a key role on Google’s board, leading a radical change in its management style.
Pichai, widely respected for combining his intellect with a management style based in large part on emotional intelligence, has taken part in the official communication of the results, and has also announced a radical rethink of the way the company uses machine learning technology, which is going to play a huge role in just about every initiative and product from now on:
“Machine learning is a core, transformative way by which we’re rethinking everything we’re doing”
The announcement should prompt questions as to just where we are. Google is already rightly regarded as a company that is pretty much at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence and machine learning: among other things it is able to offer us intelligence that reads our mail and understands that a meeting is the topic, and then asks us if we want to put it in our diary. Equally, without being asked, it can discover how heavy the traffic is on the route to our next meeting, warning us to leave a little earlier.
Similarly, Google technology is able to understand that several photographs we have taken could be put together to create a panorama effect, or merged into an animated GIF, or shared with others. It is also capable of sorting mail based on importance and subject, as well as detecting spam. These are all things that few companies could consider moving into, and that reveal a vocation for exploiting machine learning in radical new ways with the aim of improving the user experience.
What does it mean when that company, already at that cutting edge, defines machine learning as “radically transformational” and an “absolute priority”? Quite simply that we are entering a new era. A change of era that not just Google is aware of: other tech companies such as Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, are ramping up investment and hiring machine learning experts. What’s more, tech companies are just the tip of the iceberg. The key companies in every industry will likely be those that at this moment are those are using machine learning and are planning strategies based on it.
Google’s announcement heralds the arrival of a new era, a full-blown “wake up and smell the coffee”, but only for those who know how to listen.
(En español, aquí)
