Artificial intelligence and machine learning have long been touted as a silver bullet for enabling automation and improving productivity, but technological challenges had inhibited adoption. From the early days of his career, circa 2007, Ron Bodkin (pictured), technical director of applied artificial intelligence at Google LLC, has been involved in the development and deployment of the first manifestations of machine learning. Now, more than a decade into his career, Bodkin is finally seeing the technology starting to mature.

“Now we’re at a stage where many companies have put those assets together. You’ve got access to amazing cloud scale resources like we have at Google to not only work with great information, but to start to really act on it because … in parallel with that evolution of big data was the evolution of the algorithms, as well as the access to large amounts of digital data,” Bodkin said.

Bodkin spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the BigData SV event in San Jose, California. They discussed the evolution of artificial intelligence from concept to productization.

Maturing technology begins to bear fruit

At the onset of machine learning technology, there was a misconception that all data could simply be captured and value could be easily extracted. However, the key to unlocking the potential of machine learning is conscientiously the quality of data leveraged, according to Bodkin.   

“You have to at least have some level of structure in the data; you have to put some effort in curating the data so you have valid results,” Bodkin said.

As Google has scaled its internal data science and machine learning infrastructure for its own products, the company is doubling down on capitalization by offering its technology as a cloud-based service. Bodkins’ Applied AI team is responsible for working with other companies to deliver value leveraging these services, like natural language processing or image recognition.

“We’ve got this massive capability we’ve built for our own products that we’re now making available for customers, and the customers are saying, ‘How do I tap into that? How can I work with Google? How can I work with the products? How can I work with the capabilities?” Bodkin stated. 

Here’s the complete video interview below, and there’s much more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the BigData SV event. 

Photo: SiliconANGLE