[PeterisP]

It is interesting that the author assumes that the intent of industrial applied AI is to make better decisions - from my experience, in the vast majority of cases companies are applying various techniques (both AI/ML and hard-coded heuristics) with the explicit intent to get cheaper decisions, knowing very well that they aren't going to be as good as a dedicated, caring human could make them.

The goal is either business process automation (do the same thing with less people) or to enable processing at a scale where doing it manually is impractical. For example, nobody would assert that an automated email spam filtering system is going to better than a human filtering my email, but an automated filter is quite useful since most of us can't afford a personal secretary. The bar for "good enough to be useful" often is lower than "human equivalent".

[lootsauce]

This point is totally valid but in the case at my work it is actually both. The old saying in marketing is "I know i'm wasting 50% of my marketing budget I just don't know which 50%." It still holds true for companies with large budgets. We have applied XGBoost to produce many and better models for how to best allocate these budgets. The results are both better and cheaper outcomes.