Machine Learning

Machine learning is a subfield of artificial intelligence in which a system learns from data instead of being hard-coded. It recognises patterns in examples and applies them to new cases. In customer service, machine learning sits behind sentiment analysis or the automatic assignment of enquiries, for instance.

What is machine learning?

Machine learning is the approach of not programming software rule by rule, but letting it learn from examples. You show the system many cases together with the correct result, and it works out the patterns itself to classify new, unfamiliar cases. The more and the better the data, the more accurate it becomes.

Machine learning is the foundation of almost all modern AI, from spam detection to the Large Language Model behind generative AI.

AI, machine learning, deep learning

The terms often get mixed up. They are nested inside one another:

• Artificial intelligence is the umbrella term for systems that solve human-like tasks.
• Machine learning is the subfield that learns from data to do so.
• Deep learning is in turn a subfield of machine learning that works with artificial neural networks and underpins large language models.

An SMB example

An insurance agency routes incoming messages automatically. A model was trained on past enquiries and now recognises whether a message is about a claim, a contract change, or an invoice, and sends it to the right team. With every new, correctly classified enquiry, the assignment gets better.

Machine learning at SendSeven

SendSeven is a unified messaging platform for eight channels. Machine learning sits under the hood of several features, such as sentiment analysis and the intelligent routing of enquiries. The AI assistant builds on pre-trained language models and is tailored to your business via your knowledge base, with no model training of your own. The AI support bot guide shows what this looks like in practice. In line with GDPR, Made in Germany. Try it free for 14 days.