Data science plays a role in virtually all aspects of our day-to-day lives and is used across nearly all industries. The adoption of data science was largely spurred by the successes of start-ups such as Uber, Airbnb, and Facebook that rose rapidly and earned valuations of billions of dollars in a very short span of time.

Data generated by social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter, search engines such as Google and Yahoo!, and various other networks, such as Pinterest and Instagram led to a deluge of information about personal tastes, preferences, and habits of individuals. Companies leveraged the information using various machine learning techniques to gain insights.

For example, Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a machine learning technique used to analyse textual data on comments posted on public forums to extract users' interests. The users are then shown ads relevant to their interests generating sales from which companies earn ad revenue. Image recognition algorithms are utilized to automatically identify objects in an image and serve the relevant images when users search for those objects on search engines.

The use of data science as a means to not only increase user engagement but also increase revenue, has become a widespread phenomenon. Some of the domains in which data science is prevalent is given as follows. The list is not all-inclusive, but highlights some of the key industries in which data science plays an important role today:

A few of these domains have been discussed in the following sections.