“Machine Learning in deutschen Unternehmen – Betrieb und Anwendung von Künstlicher Intelligenz” (“Machine learning in German companies – operation and application of Artificial Intelligence”) is the title of the empirical study carried out by Crisp Research in cooperation with the service provider The Unbelievable Machine Company and Dell EMC in early 2018. The survey of 154 IT decision-makers shows that one in two German companies is now actively engaged with machine learning and almost half already have this technology in productive use.

Most use the technology for conventional process optimization, while machine learning is increasingly being used as the basis for digital products and in customer analysis. Over half of the companies use their digitization budget for machine-learning projects, while 40% of the decision-makers have dedicated budgets.

The key IT companies increasingly offer services, products and systems that are suitable for developing independent machine-learning platforms. For example, Microsoft recently put the Framework infer.Net under an open source license, while the Chinese search engine giant Baidu published machine learning models for image and audio recognition a few months ago.