Nishan Aryal, a cloud app developer and CTO at an innovation lab, emphasizes the importance of machine learning (ML) in various applications such as fraud detection and self-driving cars. He highlights Microsoft's contributions to ML over the years, including Azure Machine Learning's user-friendly environment for deploying ML models without deep programming knowledge. The document outlines Azure ML's features, including easy access to algorithms, web-based services, and support for popular programming languages.