Although GenAI (which relies on specific types of machine learning algorithms called neural networks that will be discussed below) is all the rage now, machine learning has been a part of our world for many years, in all sorts of fields. It’s baked into fraud detection with banks and credit card companies. Amazon’s been recommending products with it for decades. It’s been helping us try to control the flow of spam emails for as long. It determines what we see on social media sites, and it’s been used in healthcare for many years. Speech recognition has been keeping us away from human customer service representatives for longer than we’d like. And of course, businesses have long used it to forecast sales and almost anything else imaginable. Marketers, especially online marketers, embraced it early on. Map apps use it to warn you about unexpected traffic slowdowns. It’s used in courtrooms to inform decisions about defendants. You get the picture.