I’m not too surprised, they come by our shop around once a year wanting to sell Watson analytics, and because ML is a buss word in the political layer (our upper leadership) we politely listen.
It’s not really great. They can automate the process of finding reports, but the truth is, we have people already doing that and all the reports they’ve been able to find in their POCs were either useless or some we already had.
I’m sure ML has potential, but our analytics department is run by economists and political scientists who can really utilize ML and I’m not sure they could be retrained, even if they wanted to, which they don’t.
We can’t really hire ML personal either. The only people who do it well enough are PHDs, and they have much better offers, and we’re at least 5 years away from having a candidate pool of people with the right education mix (Data + political science) and probably 10 years away from figuring out how to utilize them as well as finding enough funds for a position.
So ML is mostly left to independent companies that corporate/consult with muniplicitaties in projected owned and run by the municipalities). IBM simply doesn’t do this, and the consultant companies that doesn’t suck all work with something else.
Of course this is the perspective from the Danish public sector, it might be different else where, but I have friends who work similar positions as mine in banking, and they’re telling me the same thing.