After many years of research, misfires and frightening Hollywood plotlines, artificial intelligence (AI) is finally coming into its own and beginning to demonstrate significant business value. The combined forces of big data, human expertise and AI are being used across industries as diverse as healthcare and manufacturing, as well as within all aspects of business. IT operations is one area that AI is beginning to contribute to enormously.
IT infrastructures are changing rapidly today, particularly hybrid cloud environments.
While they are increasingly dynamic and agile, they are also extraordinarily complex. Humans are no longer able to sift through the variety, volume and velocity of Big Data streaming out of IT infrastructures in real time, making AI – especially machine learning – a powerful and necessary tool for automating analysis and decision making. By helping teams bridge the gap between Big Data and humans, and by capturing human domain knowledge, machine learning is able to provide the necessary operational intelligence to significantly relieve this burden of near real-time, informed decision-making. Industry analysts agree. In fact, Gartner named machine learning among the top 10 strategic technologies for 2016, noting “The explosion of data sources and complexity of information makes manual classification and analysis infeasible and uneconomical.”