Difference Between Machine Learning and Automation

A lot of people are often confused between machine learning and automation. These two areas are very different from each other. If you’re one of those people who doesn’t know how machine learning and automation are different, this article is for you. In this article, I’ll walk you through the difference between machine learning and automation.

Difference Between Machine Learning and Automation

These two areas are often confused with each other by people who do not know either of them or who know only one. Automation is about automating the work that needs to be done on a certain event. For example, when you enter your payment information and click the Submit button, you receive an OTP which is always a unique set of numbers. It is nothing but automation. If this was done by a human employee, you would only have been able to make payments during this organization’s working hours.

So, such tasks for which a human employee is not needed and need to be done in the same way depending on the actions are nothing but automation. Some of the popular examples of automation are:

  1. Scheduled bill payments 
  2. Automatic sliding doors
  3. Resume Maker
  4. Automatic form-filling 
  5. QR code generator 
  6. Automatic Newsletters 
  7. Auto Pilot 

Thus, all systems programmed to automate the daily tasks of an organization are examples of automation. How is automation different from machine learning? Machine learning uses data to understand what future action should be. For example, if you open YouTube in your account and your friend’s account, you will find different video suggestions on both accounts. This is because YouTube uses your viewing history to recommend what should be best for you to show based on your interests. Some of the examples of machine learning are:

  1. Content Recommendations
  2. Search Engines 
  3. FaceID on Iphones 
  4. Self-driving cars
  5. Smart speakers
  6. Spam Filtering 
  7. Language Translator

Summary

Automation, therefore, means automating day-to-day tasks where a human employee is not needed to take charge of every action and machine learning means using data to predict the future course of action. Hope you liked this article on the difference between ML and automation. Please feel free to ask your valuable questions in the comments section below.

Aman Kharwal
Aman Kharwal

I'm a writer and data scientist on a mission to educate others about the incredible power of data📈.

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