Charting a business course for reinforcement learning

Jacomo Corbo, Oliver Fleming, and Nicolas Hohn, It’s time for businesses to chart a course for reinforcement learning, McKinsey, April 1, 2021.

Broadly speaking, we see reinforcement learning delivering this value across the business, with potential applications in every business domain and industry (Exhibit 2). Some of the near-term applications for reinforcement learning fall into three categories: speeding design and product development, optimizing complex operations, and guiding customer interactions.

 Exhibit 2 some applications.

To be sure, implementing reinforcement learning is a challenging technical pursuit. A successful reinforcement learning system today requires, in simple terms, three ingredients:

1. A well-designed learning algorithm with a reward function. 
2. A learning environment.  
3. Compute power. 

Computing power is better than compute power.