The thing is we're at a stage where companies hoover up every bit and byte of data they can get hold of on every customer and many non-customers because... well

The thing is we're at a stage where companies hoover up every bit and byte of data they can get hold of on every customer and many non-customers because... well it's gotta be valuable some how right? But it's so much damn data so loosely coupled to a company's actual product that trying to get any actionable intelligence out of it is basically impossible. Enter ML. "Just" chuck your data at a NN use A/B tests to train and hope the company ends up with higher revenues, if they do: claim the 'data scientists' are definitely a profit center; if they don't: claim you need more data. Until Exxon-Mobile stops storing metrics on how many goldfish I own in a given month, cranking out ML related companies seems like a good bet for VCs because it's not going to get any easier to turn progressively more esoteric data points into money.