Consider an employee who normally fills out his weekly time card on Thursday afternoon, because he doesn’t work most Fridays. Machine learning that’s built into a payroll application could help the app learn the individual working habits of each employee. Having learned this specific pattern, the app could ask him if he meant to fill out the time card when he goes to log out of the system Thursday. There’s no policy there: It’s a behavior pattern that machine learning can pick up on.

In fact, modern-day AI might be able to fill in the time card automatically, and present it to the employee for review and approval. That save even more time, and potentially eliminates errors. This capability, known as “auto defaulting,” could have applications for nearly every form-based application, from accounting to inventory to sales reporting.

Executives wrestle with how to take advantage of artificial intelligence capabilities. That’s especially true now that cloud computing resources have made the technology accessible to companies of all sizes. One of the fastest roads to AI payoff comes from using AI capabilities embedded in applications that your employees use every day—like that time card app.

Smart classification, smart recognition, and smart predictions. Those are three big buckets that encompass many cutting-edge AI and machine learning capabilities.

• Smart classification involves studying both structured and unstructured data to take action based on what it means, such as to automatically identity unreliable suppliers, properly interpret complex invoices, and categorize consumers based on their current activities and past history.
• Smart recognition looks to find anomalies in the data to find innocent errors—not-so-innocent errors. Smart recognition can help stop fraud, enforce corporate and compliance policies, and even speed financial reconciliations.
• Smart predictions go farther, such as offering proactive advice to sales reps, making recommendations in e-commerce, or providing suggestions for service reps on how to direct a customer. Pattern-matching can come into play here, such as predicting which add-on product recommendation a customer’s most likely to buy.

Learn more in my story for Forbes, “Want A Bigger Bang From AI? Embed It Into Your Apps.”

“The functional style of programming is very charming,” insists Venkat Subramaniam. “The code begins to read like the problem statement. We can relate to what the code is doing and we can quickly understand it.” Not only that, Subramaniam explains in his keynote address for Oracle Code Online, but as implemented in Java 8 and beyond, functional-style code is lazy—and that laziness makes for efficient operations because the runtime isn’t doing unnecessary work.

Subramaniam, president of Agile Developer and an instructional professor at the University of Houston, believes that laziness is the secret to success, both in life and in programming. Pretend that your boss tells you on January 10 that a certain hourlong task must be done before April 15. A go-getter might do that task by January 11.

That’s wrong, insists Subramaniam. Don’t complete that task until April 14. Why? Because the results of the boss’s task aren’t needed yet, and the requirements may change before the deadline, or the task might be canceled altogether. Or you might even leave the job on March 13. This same mindset should apply to your programming: “Efficiency often means not doing unnecessary work.”

Subramaniam received the JavaOne RockStar award three years in a row and was inducted into the Java Champions program in 2013 for his efforts in motivating and inspiring software developers around the world. In his Oracle Code Online keynote, he explored how functional-style programming is implemented in the latest versions of Java, and why he’s so enthusiastic about using this style for applications that process lots and lots of data—and where it’s important to create code that is easy to read, easy to modify, and easy to test.

Functional Versus Imperative Programming

The old mainstream of imperative programming, which has been a part of the Java language from day one, relies upon developers to explicitly code not only what they want the program to do, but also how to do it. Take software that has a huge amount of data to process; the programmer would normally create a loop that examines each piece of data, and if appropriate, take specific action on that data with each iteration of the loop. It’s up to the developer to create the loop and manage it—in addition to coding the business logic to be performed on the data.

The imperative model, argues Subramaniam, results in what he calls “accidental complexity”—each line of code might perform multiple functions, which makes it hard to understand, modify, test, and verify. And, the developer must do a lot of work to set up and manage the data and iterations. “You get bogged down with the details,” he said. This not only introduces complexity, but makes code hard to change.”

By contrast, when using a functional style of programming, developers can focus almost entirely on what is to be done, while ignoring the how. The how is handled by the underlying library of functions, which are defined separately and applied to the data as required. Subramaniam says that functional-style programming provides highly expressive code, where each line of code does only one thing: “The code becomes easier to work with, and easier to write.”

Subramaniam adds that in functional-style programming, “The code becomes the business logic.” Read more in my essay published in Forbes, “Lazy Java Code Makes Applications Elegant, Sophisticated — And Efficient at Runtime.”

Millions of developers are using Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning (ML) in their projects, says Evans Data Corp. Evans’ latest Global Development and Demographics Study, released in January 2018, says that 29% of developers worldwide, or 6,452,000 in all, are currently using some form of AI or ML. What’s more, says the study, an additional 5.8 million expect to use AI or ML within the next six months.

ML is actually a subset of AI. To quote expertsystem.com,

In practice, artificial intelligence – also simply defined as AI – has come to represent the broad category of methodologies that teach a computer to perform tasks as an “intelligent” person would. This includes, among others, neural networks or the “networks of hardware and software that approximate the web of neurons in the human brain” (Wired); machine learning, which is a technique for teaching machines to learn; and deep learning, which helps machines learn to go deeper into data to recognize patterns, etc. Within AI, machine learning includes algorithms that are developed to tell a computer how to respond to something by example.

The same site defines ML as,

Machine learning is an application of artificial intelligence (AI) that provides systems the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning focuses on the development of computer programs that can access data and use it learn for themselves.

The process of learning begins with observations or data, such as examples, direct experience, or instruction, in order to look for patterns in data and make better decisions in the future based on the examples that we provide. The primary aim is to allow the computers learn automatically without human intervention or assistance and adjust actions accordingly.

A related and popular AI-derived technology, by the way, is Deep Learning. DL uses simulated neural networks to attempt to mimic the way a human brain learns and reacts. To quote from Rahul Sharma on Techgenix,

Deep learning is a subset of machine learning. The core of deep learning is associated with neural networks, which are programmatic simulations of the kind of decision making that takes place inside the human brain. However, unlike the human brain, where any neuron can establish a connection with some other proximate neuron, neural networks have discrete connections, layers, and data propagation directions.

Just like machine learning, deep learning is also dependent on the availability of massive volumes of data for the technology to “train” itself. For instance, a deep learning system meant to identify objects from images will need to run millions of test cases to be able to build the “intelligence” that lets it fuse together several kinds of analysis together, to actually identify the object from an image.

Why So Many AI Developers? Why Now?

You can find AI, ML and DL everywhere, it seems. There are highly visible projects, like self-driving cars, or the speech recognition software inside Amazon’s Alexa smart speakers. That’s merely the tip of the iceberg. These technologies are embedded into the Internet of Things, into smart analytics and predictive analytics, into systems management, into security scanners, into Facebook, into medical devices.

A modern but highly visible application of AI/ML are chatbots – software that can communicate with humans via textual interfaces. Some companies use chatbots on their websites or on social media channels (like Twitter) to talk to customers and provide basic customer services. Others use the tech within a company, such as in human-resources applications that let employees make requests (like scheduling vacation) by simply texting the HR chatbot.

AI is also paying off in finance. The technology can help service providers (like banks or payment-card transaction clearinghouses) more accurately review transactions to see if they are fraudulent, and improve overall efficiency. According to John Rampton, writing for the Huffington Post, AI investment by financial tech companies was more than $23 billion in 2016. The benefits of AI, he writes, include:

• Increasing Security
• Reducing Processing Times
• Reducing Duplicate Expenses and Human Error
• Increasing Levels of Automation
• Empowering Smaller Companies

Rampton also explains that AI can offer game-changing insights:

One of the most valuable benefits AI brings to organizations of all kinds is data. The future of Fintech is largely reliant on gathering data and staying ahead of the competition, and AI can make that happen. With AI, you can process a huge volume of data which will, in turn, offer you some game-changing insights. These insights can be used to create reports that not only increase productivity and revenue, but also help with complex decision-making processes.

What’s happening in fintech with AI is nothing short of revolutionary. That’s true of other industries as well. Instead of asking why so many developers, 29%, are focusing on AI, we should ask, “Why so few?”