Enterprises deal with staggering amounts of data every day. To put that mountain of data to effective use, many organizations are using the cognitive computing power of machine learning. Graeme Thompson (pictured), senior vice president and chief information officer at Informatica Corp., gave the example of a customer that is a talent management organization, processing and keeping up-to-date 55 million resumes every day.

The company also extracts the metadata from those resumes to match the right candidate to the right job. While that is a profitable model for the company, Thompson explained there is a significant societal impact to that as well.

“Imagine we were all starved for talent, and imagine [finding] the right talent or the right opportunity, more often than not, using the intelligence of the data. It’s pretty interesting,” he said.

Thompson spoke to John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during Informatica World in San Francisco, California. In addition to applying machine to talent acquisition, they also discussed how it can save lives in healthcare. (* Disclosure below.)

Machine learning and keeping people safe

While everyone talks about self-driving cars and how much safer it would be if cars weren’t dependent on human drivers, Thompson said he read recently that more people are killed in the U.S. annually from prescribing the wrong drug or the wrong drug dosage than are killed on the roads.

He explained that humans work hard, but they make mistakes. If one wants to eliminate human error from a process, machine learning can execute that process more repeatedly and more accurately than a human ever could, he stated.

“The data is available, and the cost of compute is approaching zero. So we’re able to do things that the government could only do before,” Graham concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Informatica World 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Informatica World. Neither Informatica Corp. nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE