What do we mean by machine learning? It's an interdisciplinary subject that cares about the development, comprehension, and application of computational methods meant to learn and generalize from datasets; it's usually related but not limited to big data. Machine learning shores up a family of ever-growing methods, suitable for overcoming a wide range of problems.
I deeply appreciate how it has been used to fight junk email. The way it suggests replies to emails (that hardly are spam) proved to be of enormous aid too.
Such a great ability to solve problems certainly attracted big companies and tech geeks all over the world.