Can you describe a line of business function that makes novel use of ML?
On the retail side: Using computer vision to deliver alerts about shelf condition.
For farming: Using computer vision + ML to devise and track health monitoring for crops.
For manufacturing: Predictive maintenance of equipment has been a very popular area of focus.
There have been countless use cases on the finance side of things. For instance, anomaly detection techniques help with reconciling accounts and detecting fraud.
The energy industry seems to never run out of use cases for tracking commodities and/or helping predict load.
In HR, predicting turnover and education demands are some of the early use cases being approached but I expect a lot more over time.
Logistics is another area that will have a seemingly endless supply of use case. Things like loss tracking, warehouse optimization, raw material allocation and sourcing. I don't think I've ever been involved in a logistics/manufacturing project that couldn't have used some ML to add efficiency to the process.
We all see success stories for very refined and well defined problems with huge amount of training data, with models created by 1% top engineers, but for average business such conditions may not be achievable, to train model to recognize various shelf conditions in different situations, buildings, etc. you need nontrivial set of training data, and will have unclear expectations about model performance.
I believe NYT does this already, but using minimal oversight to prevent any edge case misses or false positives.
Presently there’s not much in the way of suitable options for large media that build their modules in house. At the same time media tends to prefer to not invest too heavily in hardware if they don’t have to. Convincing leadership of using a cloud service to train an AI/ML model sounds leaner and lets them tick off even more buzzwords for the executive, etc. That said, results from efforts in the aforementioned application sound promising.