4 Benefits of Machine Learning In Your Business
Have you ever posted a picture on Facebook and it automatically tagged the people within that picture? Or have you opened your email program to find junk mail automatically routed to your spam folder? Or plugged in a search with misspellings into your search engine and still get accurate results? That is machine learning.
What is machine learning?
Machine learning is the part of artificial intelligence that focuses on computer algorithms that learn from inputted data and make predictions or decisions without being explicitly told to do so. This is the algorithm actually learning from the data and experiences or results that involve that data. This is machine learning on its own.
It’s like giving the machine a problem to solve: find the cheese in the maze and then find the exit. In machine learning, your computer will create copies of that maze and run through it in different ways using those copies. It then takes the best route with the shortest time possible and applies that when actually running through your maze. Think: the way we, as humans, solve problems or puzzles but at an inhumanly fast rate.
Approaches to Machine Learning
There are three broad categories to machine learning:
- Supervised learning — this is where we teach the machine what to learn or what to do and it does what it is told. We feed the machine data and tell it what to look for or what to extract with the goal of having the machine learn a general rule to map out the desired results.
- Unsupervised learning — this is when we give the machine a bunch of data and leave it alone to deal with it with no instructions on what it is supposed to do with it.
- Reinforcement learning — this is where we give the machine rewards for performing a task correctly. This is similar to training your dog to perform tricks. For every trick your dog performs correctly, you give it a treat. Eventually your dog will do the tricks perfectly every time because it knows it will get a reward. For machines, the rewards would more likely be points. The more points it gets from “performing” correctly, the more it learns to keep performing that way.
Machine Learning in Business
Whatever business you run, it would no doubt involve large amounts of data. This is where machine learning comes in. It consumes massive amounts of data, makes sense of everything, and spits out solutions in a fraction of the time it would take for humans to even segregate the data into appropriate categories.
There are many ways in which a business can benefit from using machine learning technology.
Hiring and vetting
The hiring process can be a tedious endeavor. Using machine learning and AI processes can help narrow down your candidate search from the possible thousands of resumes submitted for an open position.
Wading through a mountain of resumes will take a lot of time and energy from your human resources team. Using a machine learning algorithm to segregate the resumes and extract only the ones that have what you are looking for will cut down on the amount of time and effort it takes a normal human to accomplish it.
Payroll and time-tracking
Computing man-hours and translating that into wages while deducting taxes and other deductibles is an error-prone process. With the use of machine learning and other AI processes, you can cut down on the amount of repetitive tasks involved in doing payroll and the errors that occur during the process. The algorithms used in AI systems and tools make payroll more efficient and accurate.
Sustainability programs
Many companies are now shifting to a more environmentally friendly way of running their business. Sustainability and eco-friendly programs are now becoming an integral part of running a business.
More and more companies are “going green” in an effort to mitigate the damage done to our environment by climate change. Going green not only benefits the planet, but it also benefits the company in many ways. Machine learning is starting to thrive in this area. Things like carbon management systems are greatly helped by algorithms that track carbon emissions and provide ways to lower a company’s carbon footprint.
Finance
Machine learning in the financial aspects of a business replaces a lot of man-hours dedicated to repetitive computing tasks. Process automation has a lot of benefits; especially cutting down operational costs and driving up productivity and efficiency while reducing errors.
Even in areas like blockchain for business, machine learning accelerates the process of recording transactions and simplifying it at the same time. This also helps strengthen security and helps detect fraudulent activity because machine learning algorithms can be trained to identify the different warning signs of fraud.
Conclusion
The integration of machine learning into the different processes of a business has many benefits. It will cut down on operational costs, time spent on certain repetitive tasks, and definitely decrease the number of errors committed in the processes that use machine learning.
