As someone who was recently the main person doing machine learning research & development in a ‘data driven company’, I can confirm that we were working as hard as we could to replace human decision making with machine learning models on every level of the business that we could. It worked better, made more money, more reliably, with fewer hours of human work input. Over the years I was there we gradually scaled down the workforce of human decision makers and scaled up the applications of ML and each step along that path was clearly a profit win. Money spent on testing and maintaining new models, and managing the massive data pipelines they depended on, quickly surpassed the money spent on wages to people. I suspect a lot of companies are pushing in similar directions.
As someone who was recently the main person doing machine learning research & development in a ‘data driven company’, I can confirm that we were working as hard as we could to replace human decision making with machine learning models on every level of the business that we could. It worked better, made more money, more reliably, with fewer hours of human work input. Over the years I was there we gradually scaled down the workforce of human decision makers and scaled up the applications of ML and each step along that path was clearly a profit win. Money spent on testing and maintaining new models, and managing the massive data pipelines they depended on, quickly surpassed the money spent on wages to people. I suspect a lot of companies are pushing in similar directions.