Data Science, Machine Learning, & Artificial Intelligence: Bringing the Data Revolution

The changing times ushering in digital transformation are fast taking over the world. Earlier, building resource potential mostly meant tapping tangible resources. But, in today’s digital era, the focus is constantly shifting to building an intangible digital resource potential across the world. 

There is an increased demand for skilled personnel with an in-depth knowledge of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and data science. Artificial intelligence is the ever-evolving, brain-innovating newer algorithms to perform complex work. Notably, machine learning is a part of artificial intelligence. Further, data science involves handling and analyzing loads of data to make business decisions easier.

There are a plethora of online courses that offer a machine learning certificate or an AI and data science certification. Before choosing the most-suitable course, find out what these fields offer, how they can help you and what is the future of this digital industry. This article gives you an in-depth insight into the three and how relevant online learning can help you re-level your skills for higher employability.

Introduction to Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Data Science

What is Artificial Intelligence?

The phrase “artificial intelligence” was coined by the English mathematician Alan Turin in the 1950s. While most people think of artificial intelligence as a robot-dominated world, it only deals with artificially developing human-like intelligence in software systems. To put it simply, artificial intelligence aims at creating machines that have the ability to reason and solve complex issues without human interference.

Building artificial intelligence involves developing complex algorithms that will emulate a human’s ability to identify, analyze, and effectively solve a problem. This function will drastically reduce the work pressure on humans in handling complex business operations. Using artificial intelligence will also make the dream of running fully or partially automated businesses come true.

What is Machine Learning?

Machine learning is a sub-branch of artificial intelligence. With machine learning, a system can easily predict inferences, come to conclusions and act accordingly without any human programming. It uses algorithms solely based on statistical analysis that helps predict patterns of data and update programs with experience.

Machine learning comes under the purview of artificial intelligence as both seek to become independent from human interference. With machine learning, a software system gets continually updated with newer inputs of data. The acquired data is scanned thoroughly to seek any repetitive pattern that correlates with past experience. 

What is Data Science?

Data science is completely different from artificial intelligence and machine learning. As the digitalization of businesses has created huge volumes of data, storing, using, and analyzing it has become important. Data science precisely involves storing, maintaining, and retrieving huge data sets to derive meaningful information out of them. 

In businesses, the demand for data scientists is rising exponentially as they can help in efficiently warehousing, managing, and modeling data. The random data clusters are processed using various tools and algorithms that ultimately generate meaning out of them. With data science, a business can efficiently set achievable organizational goals, predict results and propose business growth alternatives effectively.

Are Data Science, Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence Almost the Same?

To answer in brief, no the three are not the same but are closely associated with one another. The main reason why the work of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science sounds similar is that all three work with one key component – data. However, the three are completely different in their scope and serve different sets of benefits individually and collectively to businesses. 

As data science deals with managing huge amounts of data, it may involve artificial intelligence to ease out the complex manual operations involved. With artificial intelligence constantly using logic, reasoning, and mathematical algorithms to solve a problem, the tedious human work gets reduced to a great extent. Now, as machine learning involves the auto-programmed statistical operations compiling and updating data based on past experience, it can also prove beneficial when intertwined with data science. 

A business that is built on data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence will grow exponentially more than others who don’t use these technologies. The data that is constantly being generated and analyzed by data scientists are used to process and predict business inferences by machine learners. Again, the same data is used simultaneously to run machines that emulate human intelligence, using artificial intelligence.

While the three are closely interlinked in making businesses successful, they differ in their final outcomes. The first point of difference is data science deals solely with data operations and artificial intelligence is the umbrella term that includes machine learning. Artificial intelligence helps computers to learn and react automatically, machine learning enables systems to learn from experience and repeat actions without human interference, and data science helps in extracting analytical information from data sets.

Regarding the type of mechanisms underlying each of the three, artificial intelligence makes use of logical reasoning and decision trees. The difference between data science and machine learning is that the latter uses statistical algorithms to automate tasks while data science piles, combines, and interprets structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data to derive conclusions.

Areas of Application of Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Data Science

Although the three are used collectively to grow a business, each has its specific field of application. Uses of artificial intelligence can be seen in tools like Scikit Learn, Tensor Flow, and Keras while the use of machine learning tools is widely seen in Amazon Lex, Microsoft Azure ML Studio, and IBM Watson Studio. Important tools in data science include Matlab, Apache Spark, and SAS2. 

Examples of applications of artificial intelligence are seen in features like Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa. Here, the input data is given to the application by humans but the proceeding stages of understanding, processing, and delivering the output result are done by artificial intelligence. 

With machine learning-enabled applications, making predictions and producing user-optimized results is the key output. Applications such as YouTube, Facebook, and Spotify, use features like suggestive videos, Facebook auto-tagging, and suggestive playlists based on previous records of user preference. These examples show how via machine learning, easy predictions can be made based on analysis of previous experience which will favor predicting the success of business models.

The application of data science is seen through an example in the health care sector. Huge chunks of data on the major causes and symptoms of coronavirus are prepared along with the rate of infection spread and rate of recovery. Based on the data collected, it can be integrated, modeled, and analyzed which will help us in understanding the patterns and projections of the disease spread in a country.

Why is it Important to Learn About Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Data Science?

The changing times are ushering in newer and upgraded standards of digitalizing businesses. With digitalization, an overflowing pool of digital resources is constantly being updated. These resources when manually handled become tedious and also engage employees in unnecessary laborious work that can otherwise be performed by machines themselves.

The main focus of all the three combined is to shift towards automation in all sectors of businesses. Having said this, the future indicates a promising evolution and utilization of these three not only in businesses but also in the day-to-day activities of society. Hence, the need of the hour is to learn, re-learn and upskill through AI ML courses or a data science online course that offers intensive application-based learning on these futuristic digital resources.

How can you Benefit from Learning any of These Three Skills?

At present, there are more than 50,000 jobs lying vacant in India in the field of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science. Having learned any of the three skills will serve as an important asset that will forever serve you high-valued employability. Online courses that offer an AI certification, a machine learning course for beginners, or a data science certification will help you land a high-paying job in any of your desired sectors. 

The best data science courses can land you a job in positions like data scientist, data science engineer, and data analyst. While the data science course fee is a bit higher than that of AI/ML courses, the salary structure is very lucrative in top companies like Deloitte, Amazon, and Accenture. In India, an entry-level data scientist can earn Rs. 5-12 LPA while people with more years of experience can easily earn in the range of Rs. 20-25 LPA.

A person having an AI certification after completion of an artificial intelligence course can earn up to Rs. 5 LPA as a beginner. Companies like Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft also offer an annual package of Rs. 18 LPA to more experienced professionals. Popular jobs in this field include AI architect, AI research analyst, AI developer, and robotics engineer.

A person with a machine learning certificate will easily fit into jobs like machine learning engineer, ML architect, and ML research and development. Top MNCs actively recruiting machine learning experts include Amazon, Accenture, Deloitte, Google, etc. A person having done a machine learning course for beginners can earn anywhere from Rs. 5 LPA to Rs 22 LPA based on seniority and experience. 

Future of Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Data Science

A survey report by Gartner suggests that over 75% out of the 10 lakh registered companies in India are ready to invest in AI/ML and data science sectors. Be it the health care, banking and finance, hospitality, fintech, edtech, tourism, or technical sectors, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science is the future. As top MNCs have already started leveraging the advantages of these, medium- and small-scale businesses will also follow in the coming years.

Now is the best time to upskill or learn any of these three skills from scratch as the demand is very high. Due to the absolute dearth of skilled personnel in these sectors, top companies are ready to pull in people who can apply even the basic knowledge of machine learning and data science. Over the next 10 years, the demand for skilled professionals is about to rise exponentially.

The only downside of this futuristic digital progress towards automation is that average employees lacking these skills will be easily laid off. Automation will reduce the need for manual laborers and significantly cut down the cost to a company for employee compensation. Hence, online learning of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science will both accrue impressive salary packages along with lifetime growth and job security.

Which Course will be Your Best Pick?

Considering your knowledge background and aptitude is important to choose the right course. If you have a strong mathematics and science base, then opting for machine learning and artificial intelligence will be beneficial. Having a commerce background with standard statistical know-how will help in making a career in data science. 

If you want to showcase the practical applications of intelligent innovations in software, then machine learning is a good choice. But, if you have the creativity to design solutions for complex and abstract problems, then artificial intelligence will be a good pick. Finally, if statistical analysis and interpretations excite you, then a data science course will prove beneficial.

Summing up, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science have become the key buzzwords in 2022 for their reasons. These not only help in growing businesses seamlessly but also help in avoiding potential risks through predictive analysis. The plethora of tools and features AI, ML, and DS offer helps a business understand the customer needs/preferences and demands and cater to them accordingly increasing customer footfall.

The distinct overlap between artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science shows the importance of learning at least the basics about each of the three. The Hero Vired Integrated Program in Data Science, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence is a 11-month online certification program offered in collaboration with MIT to make you future-ready to bring innovations in technologies that most businesses are looking for.

It offers comprehensive learning on predictive analysis and smart technologies. It comes with gamified and interactive learning and is hands-on with numerous practical projects and assignments integrated into the curriculum. The program also offers placement assurance (*T&C Apply) to help kickstart your career.