Need AI? Go to the cloud.
Artificial intelligence is not for the faint-hearted, as it requires investments, expertise, and lots of hand-holding. That’s why most enterprises will turn to as-a-Service offerings, leaving back-end processing, data management, and even algorithm development. But the AIaaS market is just starting to gear up.
That’s the word from the Future Today Institute, which looked at the ways AI is expected to percolate throughout enterprises. It will be a lucrative one at that: “the global AI market should grow 20% annually between 2020 and 2024, while global economic growth generated by AI could reach $16 trillion by the end of this decade,” the report’s authors predict.
The report’s authors point to the cloud sector as the platforms on which AI will see its highest levels of adoption. “Corporate leaders within the AI ecosystem have been racing to capture AI cloudshare— and to become the most trusted provider of AI,” the report’s authors state. The advantage, at least initially, goes to existing vendors, they note. “Enterprise customers are likely to stick with their initial vendor, because the more data that a machine learning system has access to, the better decisions it will learn to make over time.”
Current AI market leaders include Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, IBM, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Alibaba, and Baidu. “The prize will be to become the operating system of the next era of tech,” according to NYU Stern School of Business professor Arun Sundararajan.
Thus, AI-as-a-Service — along with adjoining Data-as-a-Service — is reshaping the landscape. “Microsoft, IBM, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple are all developing new services and tools ranging from robotic process automation to offering graphics processing units (GPUs) in the cloud,” the Future Today Institute researchers state. “Amazon’s upcoming project, AWS For Everyone —a low-code/no-code platform built to enable anyone to create business applications using their company data—will be a huge differentiator when it launches.”
AIaaS won’t just benefit users — it’s also a way for developers to quickly get AI applications up and running. Serverless computing is another way cloud is changing the AI marketplace. “Amazon Web Services, Alibaba Cloud, Microsoft’s Azure, Google Cloud and Baidu Cloud are rolling out new offerings and packages for developers, hoping to make it easier and more affordable for a wide swath of AI startups to launch their ideas into the marketplace,” the report’s authors illustrate.
Not all AI will be in the cloud. Along with AIaaS, the report’s authors point to AI at the Edge — or “AI Not in the Cloud” — that will be resident within devices and remote systems. Companies such as Google and Nvidia are taking the lead in AI-at-the-Edge initiatives, “building networks that can make local AI-driven processing and decision-making on devices, without any interaction of data in the cloud or the Internet.” Edge-based AI will be seen in health care, automotive and manufacturing applications, the report’s authors add.
