It's not clear there has been any deep impact actually, but there has been a lot of discussion (and grant proposals) I've seen a lot of cross pollination of ML

It's not clear there has been any deep impact actually, but there has been a lot of discussion (and grant proposals) I've seen a lot of cross pollination of ML and AI techniques into various disciplines. A large percentage just didn't work at all, most of the rest were more "kind of interesting, but". Nothing earthshaking happened although pop sci press likes to talk about it a lot. If you have more digital data than you used to, using modern free frameworks and toolkits to do basic (i.e. older, boring, but understood) ML stuff to understand it seems to have a reasonable return. Mostly I think this is because it becomes accessible to someone without much background in the area, and you can do reasonable things without having to put 6 months of reading and implementing together before starting.