CXOs are grappling with the challenges of managing AI and ML deployments and determining what benefits they can deliver to the business. This ebook, based on the latest ZDNet/TechRepublic special feature, offers an in-depth look at how the enterprise is approaching the complexities and possibilities of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

From the ebook:

It’s quite possible you’re sick of hearing about artificial intelligence (AI) and how it could transform your business. But away from the marketing hype, there are sound reasons to start investigating how AI could benefit your company.

The first step to understanding what the fuss is about and separating the signal from the noise is jettisoning the term AI. While ‘AI’ describes an academic field devoted to studying how to build intelligent machines, it’s a loosely defined term, leaving room for unscrupulous vendors to rebrand legacy software by throwing AI into the sales pitch.

“With people using AI to describe pretty much everything, this is where the hype comes in,” says Dr Panos Constantinides, associate professor at Warwick Business School. “The hype revolves around the lack of clarity as to what we mean by AI,” he added.

To sidestep that confusion, it’s better to be more specific: what most tech vendors mean today when talking about AI is machine learning (ML).

Machine learning is a subset of AI, which describes the process of computers learning how to carry out a wide range of tasks by analysing large volumes of data, rather than following instructions laid out by a programmer in a piece of software.

Interest in machine learning has exploded thanks to recent breakthroughs in areas like computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language understanding. Fuelling these advances are new ways of carrying out machine learning, such as deep learning, which in turn has been made possible by the power of modern processors and the large quantities of data that organisations can now collect.