How companies are using machine learning to get faster and more efficient

SCANNING IMAGES, VOICE AND TEXT

Previewing video. New York City-based Clarifai uses machine learning to find certain people or objects in videos in far less time than a person can. The technology can pick out kinds of people — mountain climbers, for instance — to help advertisers match ads to the videos.

Interpreting images. MetaMind, in Silicon Valley, offers a service called HealthMind, which uses computer vision to analyze medical scans of brains, eyes and lungs to find tumors or lesions. As a result, doctors spend less time interpreting images and more time consulting with their patients.

Documenting and data entry. The London-based startup Arria helps customers automatically generate reports in industries ranging from health care to finance to oil and gas. The company’s language-processing technology learns how to write reports by scanning texts and determining relationships between concepts. Then it scours incoming data to build new reports.

UNCOVERING BURIED INSIGHTS

Market monitoring. Dataminr, based in New York City, uses a variety of indicators to identify tweets with relevant information for stock traders. An alert sent to a trader that provides even a three-minute advantage can translate into significant profit. News services are also using Dataminr to find breaking news, which enables reporters to cover stories faster.

Predictive modeling. SailThru, also from New York City, helps marketers deploy more effective promotional emails by analyzing email and Web data to build customer profiles. SailThru’s system learns customers’ interests and buying patterns, then predicts who will buy what and when, enabling marketers to send timely messages.

Root cause analysis. Sight Machine, a manufacturing analytics company based in San Francisco and Livonia, Michigan, helps customers manage quality control. On an assembly line, a quality problem can trigger hundreds of alerts from potentially thousands of different sensors. Sight Machine uses machine learning to interpret the pattern of those alerts, helping engineers to pinpoint the root of the problem.

(H. James Wilson is managing director of information technology, and Allen Alter is a senior research fellow, at the Accenture Institute for High Performance. Sharad Sachdev is managing director of Accenture Analytics.)