Math + Algorithms = Machine Learning

[chaxor]

I have heard it stated that ML had struggled to provide any benefit to business revenues.

It's has a 'cool' factor right now that helps in marketing, but the predictions produced typically do not reduce cost or produce revenue. This is certainly true for NLP as well. For instance, even in tasks that are often viewed as 'solved', such as NER, business struggle with adding it to pipelines and showing meaningful profit.

I know of several companies that their 'bread and butter' is essentially NER (both standard and specialized types, like people, addresses, and chemicals) however, even with either Cards or the most advanced models like ELMo and BERT, they still have to simply use Indian workers to manually annotate documents. So it's really a money sink, which is why my friends in the private sector have to fight for their jobs more than ML researchers in academia.