What is AIaaS? Is it the ‘next big thing’?

Many big IT companies such as Amazon (Web Services), Google (Cloud Platform), Microsoft (Azure) and IBM (Developer Cloud) have started providing Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS) in the last few years. These programs are intended to reduce the entrance costs of using Artificial Intelligence to other companies.

So, what is AIaaS?

Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS) helps businesses to leverage AI for different use cases while simultaneously reducing risk and expense. This can involve a sampling of several public cloud platforms to test various algorithms in machine learning. The applicability of AIaaS reaches through all sectors and as the features associated with each service provider are different, users can choose from a number of choices, including enterprises.

In this article, we will look at some of the advantages that businesses can gain by using AIaaS.

Why leverage AIaaS for the business solution?

Cost and Time Effective

One of the major advantages associated with AIaaS is the reduced expense and time taken to implement the solution. It saves businesses from setting up their own applications by having a ready infrastructure and pretrained algorithms. While earlier business solutions had to create their own application, now all that businesses need to do in this case is to call a service provider.

AIaaS is based on existing cloud framework by training the machine learning models and then deploying them for inference to VMs and containers. Service providers use the existing infrastructure that would otherwise have built on IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service) without building custom machine learning models. That is another significant benefit as it decreases financial risk and increases strategic versatility.

Usability

With AWS, Microsoft and Google leading the market, businesses are now competing with each other to build tools for data scientists and developers in an effort to be more than just service providers. Adding to this is the move to open-source their platforms such as TensorFlow, Caffe and AutoML enabling developers to create a custom AI model.

Transparency

With lower costs, there’s a lot of transparency within AIaaS: pay for what you’re using. Even though machine learning takes a lot of power to hewn it’s working, you may only need the power in a short period of time – you don’t have to run AI non-stop.

Scalability

AIaaS lets you begin with smaller projects to learn if this is the best match for those projects. You can customize your service and scale up or down as project demands change, as you gain expertise with your own data.

Types of AIaaS

Bots and digital assistance

This will include, for example, chat bots that use natural language processing (NLP) algorithms that learn from human speech and mimic the patterns of language while providing responses. It frees customer service staff and lets them concentrate on more complicated activities. These are the forms of AIaaS most commonly used currently.

Cognitive computing APIs

Short for application programming interface, APIs are a means for developers to add a new feature or service without writing the code from scratch to the application they are building up. Popular API solutions include NLP, speech and computer vision, translation, knowledge mapping, search, and detection of emotions.

Machine learning frameworks

These are methods that developers can use to build their own model, that learns from current organization data over time. Machine learning is often linked with big data but can also have other uses – and these frameworks offer a way to build in machine learning activities without the big data environment being needed.

Fully-managed machine learning services

If machine learning frameworks are the first step towards machine learning, this alternative is a way to incorporate templates, pre-built models, and drag-and-drop tools to create a more customized machine learning system for developers.

AIaaS Vendors

The four major AIaaS providers, namely Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and IBM Cloud, are quite well-known. Each vendor provides different types of bots, APIs, and machine learning frameworks, as well as full-managed machine learning options for all but IBM.

Many well-known technology firms, including Oracle, BMC and SalesForce, are starting to enter the competition.

There are numerous start-ups already working on different parts of AIaaS. This is the case in all industries; purchasing the smaller companies is not unusual for the bigger corporations to add the developed services to their portfolios.

The Position for AIaaS

AIaaS models will be vital for the implementation of AI. AIaaS greatly enhances business processes by providing analytical behaviors that are persistently learned and perfected by a machine. Knowledge obtained from specially-built algorithms allows organizations operate in ever more effective ways based on real-time, highly granular insights.

AIaaS is how the promise of AI can be understood, and how businesses will be changed for the better. Everything that once was a distant dream has come to life. It’s high time to embrace it.