At HSMAI’s Sales Leader Forum on Nov. 5–6, Dr. Kelly McGuire, principal with McRevenue LLC, presented a breakout session on “Data and Analytics for Sales Leaders.” Here is the second of four key takeaways:
- When to use machine learning. “Not every problem is a machine learning problem,” McGuire said. “It’s great for these messy, complex problems, but if it’s relatively simple, it’s going to be a sledgehammer with a mosquito.”
If the cost of failure is high, machine learning is not a great solution, because it is designed to be wrong sometimes, she said. Indeed, there are many problems in hospitality that can be solved without machine learning. Examples of problems that machine learning can help with include chat, recommendation engines, and image recognition.