Survey Finds Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are Top Business Priorities

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 07, 2018 -- MemSQL, provider of the fastest real-time data warehouse, today announced the results of a survey commissioned with O’Reilly Media on the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in the workplace. According to the survey of over 1,600 respondents, 61 percent, regardless of company size, indicated ML and AI as their companies’ most significant data initiative for next year, when asked to pick from several options likely to be important concerns in today’s climate. With big data and business analytics initiatives coming in at a close second (58 percent).

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The majority of respondents (88 percent) indicated that their company already has, or has plans to, implement AI and ML technologies within their organization. Of those planning to implement ML/AI, the respondents appear eager for these implementations, and 95 percent indicated it would either complement or make it easier to do their job rather than reducing or making their role harder. 

Additional Key Survey Findings

• 65 percent of respondents using, and planning to use, ML/AI cited that a key aspect of adopting ML and AI was to enable more informed business decision making, underscoring the importance of these technologies for analytics.
   
• 74 percent of all respondents consider ML and AI to be a game changer, indicating it had the potential to transform their job and industry.
   
• Of those indicating they actively use ML and AI, 58 percent indicated they ran models in production.
   
• The findings also suggest that uses of such technologies are evolving rapidly, with 77 percent of respondents actively using ML/AI indicating that creating new models was part of their short-term goals.

Based on these priorities, those indicating they were data scientists more commonly reported being part of a company having ML and AI already in place. Moreover, among the organizations not currently using ML and AI, the responses suggest it is a lack of data science talent that most impedes them from using these technologies, this is especially the case amongst those that reported they were at smaller companies.

As ML and AI technologies spread through organizations, the need for data scientists and other technical professionals is growing. To make the jobs of these professionals easier, they will need to assess the technology infrastructure stacks already in place to support the new technologies.

These survey results underscore the need for an intelligent database that can support advanced workloads. MemSQL is the database for transactions and analytics at scale, allowing data scientists to do model and operationalize advanced computations quickly. MemSQL has native integrations with Apache Kafka, including exactly once semantics, and a high performance parallel connector to Apache Spark.

To learn more, please review the complete survey results memsql.com/mlsurvey. To learn more about MemSQL, visit memsql.com to get started on modernizing your data and application infrastructure.

Survey Specs
The survey was conducted from October to November 2017, and was answered by 1624 respondents with various job functions including developers, data scientists, and data analysts.

About MemSQL
MemSQL envisions a world of adaptable databases and flexible data workloads - your data anywhere in real time. Today, global enterprises use MemSQL as an intelligent database to cost-effectively ingest data and produce industry-leading time to insight. MemSQL works as a managed service, on any cloud or on-premises. Visit memsql.com or follow us @memsql.

Kristi Lewandowski
810-287-5355
[email protected]