The huge amount of data that O2O businesses generate makes them fertile territory for machine learning, the information-heavy approaches to artificial intelligence that are now dominant, as we discussed in Chapter 3. User interface and user experience design, too, are experiencing a heyday, in large part because of the popularity of platforms. It’s extremely hard to make websites flexible, powerful, and intuitive all at the same time, and even harder to do the same for apps (because they have to run on phones’ small screens). All the platform builders we’ve talked to have stressed how hard
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