I work in the public sector of Denmark, and we’re targeted by a lot of the hype. Which is worrisome, because it might actually lead to stupid projects if it becomes a political focus. So far it hasn’t though, and blockchain never did, so who knows.
The thing about ML is that all the BI is worse than what we are already doing. Because it’s hyped we’ve naturally done proofs of concepts, with universities and with big tech, and no one has been capable of providing ML based analytics or BI that is even remotely close to what we already do. Because the simple truth is that we have been working with data for four decades. We have full time analysts who do nothing else, and they are simply lightyears ahead of anything ML we’ve seen, and, they can actually explain their results to our politicians and decision makers.
Where ML does work, and the fact that it does separates it from blockchain, is for recognition. We have a lot of data, often in poor quality, and ML can troll through it faster and with higher quality than our human workers. We had to go through every casefile in a specific area, and identify which ones were missing a specific form. A casefile can be 500 A4 pages long, sometimes scanned in really terrible quality, and we had 500.000 of them. It took 12 people 6 months to do so, simultaneously we did a ML poc. It took 3 months to train the algorithm, but only one employee, and once it was done being trained, it took around five hours with a lot of Azure iron to troll through the data. ML had better results than our human effort and it was obviously way cheaper.
So ML and AI may be a lot of hype, but it’s also more than that.