Is there a gap between AI products and their users?

This seems to be thing.

AltDeep is a newsletter focused on mental models and microtrend-spotting in machine learning, and AI.

I perceive various manifestations of a persistent gap between AI products and the users they are intended for…

1. An entire cottage industry is devoted to helping design and manage campaigns on top ad platforms such as Google and Facebook, despite ads being these platforms’ primary source of revenue.

2. I’ve talked to leaders at AI startups that market tools based on machine learning for natural language understanding that help marketers analyzing and optimize marketing and advertising campaigns (AdSense, content SEO, email promotions, A/B content experimentation). A consistent complaint I’ve heard is that the individuals who have the sophistication and inclination to make use of such tools are rare. They are likely to be employed by companies large and sophisticated enough to have a custom tool or can get a marketing technology company to give them a custom implementation that doesn’t scale.

3. Heard from a VC… “The problem is that now when you ship AI, you have to ship a Ph.D. along with it.”

4. A few years ago, the probabilistic programming community was talking about democratizing AI. Now they are talking about program transformations and other advanced research topics.