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Comment by BjoernKW | Hacker News Reader

I'd say that by far the greatest potential in process optimization still lies with improvements in areas that don't require machine learning, such as:

- fully or partially paper-based processes

- digital systems that can't easily exchange data with one another

It always makes me want to cry when I sees systems where due to the lack of a proper interface between software components the API between these components essentially can be described as "Print it out on paper and hand it to someone else to type it into another software."

You don't need machine learning for that. You need APIs and first and foremost you need people to talk to each other and agree upon joint requirements for different components and the system as a whole.

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are there still problems like this? doesn't everyone already know the this is a saas startup now? wouldn't have all of the inefficiencies already been poached? if not I'd love to know about some

There is absolutely still a host of problems like this and no, there are still many inefficiencies waiting to be poached.

Often these are internal, sometimes highly customer-specific products though.

In many cases writing a simple interface between two existing components unfortunately won't do because these components were either never meant to have external interfaces in the first place or the original programmers aren't available anymore and nobody really knows how to change these components.

So, your only option is rebuilding the whole system from scratch, which is no easy undertaking, given that these kinds of systems often have accumulated decades worth of knowledge and business logic.

chances are that if they haven't automated it, it's not revenue generating or important enough to invest capital to fix it

Could be but then machine learning doesn't help either.

There's still a lot to fix and automate though with a significant ROI.

Did you know for example that the paperwork required for sending a shipping container from Shanghai to Rotterdam is more expensive than the actual transport of the container itself?

Freight forwarder Maersk considers this to be a painful enough problem to try and solve it with Blockchain technology now (one of the few cases where using a Blockchain actually makes sense because not all participants involved in the process necessarily trust each other).

This is demonstrably false, since it can be said of the problems addressed by any new product, and new products succeed all the time.

Or it is worth fixing but nobody can be bothered to collect/review the data showing the cost of doing nothing.

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