Press Release: August 7, 2018
O’Reilly Survey: The State of Enterprise Machine Learning Adoption
Global Survey Reveals Key Findings from Machine Learning Deployments and Identifies Where Companies Should Focus as they Begin their Machine Learning Journey
Boston, MA—O’Reilly, the premier source for insight-driven learning on technology and business, today announced its latest survey findings in the report, "The State of Machine Learning Adoption in the Enterprise." As machine learning has become more widely adopted across industries, O'Reilly set out to learn more about how companies approach this work.
By surveying more than 11,000 data specialists across North America, Europe, and Asia, the company has identified some of the key learnings that derive from deploying machine learning in production, and where other companies should focus as they begin their journey of machine learning adoption.
Notable findings from the survey include:
- Job titles specific to machine learning are already widely used at organizations with extensive machine learning experience: data scientist (81%), machine learning engineer (39%), deep learning engineer (20%). 54% of respondents who belong to companies with extensive experience in machine learning check for fairness and bias (compared to 40% across all respondents).
- More than half (53%) of respondents who work for companies with extensive experience in machine learning check for privacy (43% across all respondents). The EU's GDPR mandates "privacy-by-design," which means more companies will continue to add privacy to their machine learning checklist.
- 51% of respondents use internal data science teams to build their machine learning models, whereas use of AutoML services from cloud providers is in low single digits, and this split grows even more pronounced among sophisticated teams. Companies with less-extensive experience tend to rely on external consultants.
- Sophisticated teams tend to have data science leads set team priorities and determine key metrics for project success—responsibilities that would typically be performed by product managers in more traditional software engineering.
"Navigating large-scale machine learning deployments is no easy feat, especially in light of recent privacy legislation such as GDPR. This research gives organizations a better understanding of how other companies are approaching machine learning at all stages of adoption and how the technology is impacting these companies from a cultural and organizational perspective," said Ben Lorica, O'Reilly chief data scientist and Strata Data Conference chair.
Full survey results can be downloaded from the O'Reilly website. Further exploring some of the most important trends and developments in machine learning, O'Reilly and Cloudera will host the upcoming Strata Data Conference taking place September 11–13 in New York City.
Conference registration is now open, and a limited number of media passes are available for qualified journalists and analysts. For questions regarding media credentials, contact [email protected]; for media queries or scheduling interviews, contact [email protected]. Follow @strataconf or #StrataData on Twitter for the latest news and updates.
About O’Reilly
For almost 40 years, O’Reilly has provided technology and business training, knowledge, and insight to help companies succeed. Our unique network of experts and innovators share their knowledge and expertise through the company’s Safari training and learning platform and at O’Reilly conferences. As a SaaS learning platform, Safari delivers highly topical and comprehensive technology and business learning solutions to millions of users across enterprise, consumer, and university channels. For more information, visit www.oreilly.com.