The standard supervised-learning stuff doesn't have that high a barrier to entry these days, although offloading it as a service to the cloud is of course even easier. But on the client side, things like Weka are simple enough that plenty of CS undergrads use them in intro data-mining/AI/stats classes: http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/

Off-the-shelf recommendation systems are a bit trickier though, yeah.