But the 124-year-old industrial giant is also transforming itself for the digital age. It's fashioning software that pulls data from all this hardware, hoping to gain an insight into industrial operations that was never possible in the past. The problem is that analyzing all this data is difficult, and the talent needed to make it happen is scarce. So GE is going shopping.

The company just paid an undisclosed amount to acquire a Berkeley-based machine learning startup called Wise.io. "There's thirty of them," GE CEO Jeff Immelt says gleefully of the Wise.io team, which is heavy with astrophysicists. "You match them with aviation data, and they're killer."

That's great for GE and Immelt—and for their customers. But what if you're a small software company trying to inject some AI into your operation?