Key Trends Framing the State of AI and ML Posted on : Jun 30 - 2020

There’s no doubt that artificial intelligence continues to be swiftly adopted by companies worldwide. In just the last few years, most companies that were evaluating or experimenting with AI are now using it in production deployments. When organizations adopt analytic technologies like AI and machine learning (ML), it naturally prompts them to start asking questions that challenge them to think differently about what they know about their business across departments, from manufacturing, production and logistics, to sales, customer service and IT. An organization’s use of AI and ML tools and techniques – and the various contexts in which it uses them – will change as they gain new knowledge.

O’Reilly’s learning platform is a treasure trove of information about the trends, topics, and issues tech and business leaders need to know to do their jobs and keep their businesses running. We recently analyzed the platform’s user usage to take a closer look at the most popular and most-searched topics in AI and ML. Below are some of the key findings that show where the state of AI and ML is, and where it is headed.

Unrelenting Growth in AI and ML

First and foremost, our analysis found that interest in AI continues to grow. When comparing 2018 to 2019, engagement in AI increased by 58% – far outpacing growth in the much larger machine learning topic, which increased only 5% in 2019. When aggregating all AI and ML topics, this accounts for nearly 5% of all usage activity on the platform. While this is just slightly less than high-level, well-established topics like data engineering (8% of usage activity) and data science (5% of usage activity), interest in these topics grew 50% faster than data science. Data engineering actually decreased about 8% over the same time due to declines in engagement with data management topics.

We also discovered early signs that organizations are experimenting with advanced tools and methods. Of our findings, engagement in unsupervised learning content is probably one of the most interesting. In unsupervised learning, an AI algorithm is trained to look for previously undetected patterns in a data set with no pre-existing labels or classification with minimum human supervision or guidance. In 2018, the usage for unsupervised learning topics grew by 53% and by 172% in 2019. View More