Chapter 12 Issues and Advantages of Advanced Analytics, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace

The awareness of probability was observed in ancient cultures through the discovery of primitive dice games made with animal bones. The history of analytics in the workplace, as it is currently known (defined as predictive analytics), probably started in ancient Roman times, when the concept of insurance was first created. While the previous example showed that analytics for business had been around for some time, it is only relatively recently that there is an increased emphasis on the use of analytics in the modern firm. Credit card firms and retail catalog companies relied on analytics to drive their business models, for most of the latter half of the twentieth century. The use of advanced analytics for business also grew around the Millennium since the widespread use of data warehousing and relational databases on client servers. Moreover, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Techniques, which have been around for many decades, have had very few breakthrough successful applications up until recently when cloud computing and being able to take advantage of the infrastructure of companies, such as Amazon and Google, with their Cloud Services enabled these algorithms to be used to their full extent in firms. This powerful infrastructure availability coupled with BIG DATA is creating breakthrough applications across many business models on a consistent basis. This chapter explores the use of advanced analytics across different business functional areas. It also introduces some breakthrough models, which include Netflix, Pandora, eHarmony, Zillow, and Amazon, and explores how these are not only changing the lives of consumers but also changing the nature of the workplace and creating new issues for firms such as data protection and liabilities for the actions of automated algorithms.