The emergence of the cloud

Developing AI solutions in the cloud helps organizations leapfrog their innovation, in addition to alleviating the challenges described here. One of the first steps is to bring all the data close together or in the same tool for easy retrieval. The cloud is the most optimal landing zone that meets this requirement. The cloud provides near-infinite storage, easy access to other data sources, and on-demand compute. Solutions that are built on the cloud are easier to maintain and update, due to there being a single pane of control. The availability of improved or customized hardware at the click of a button was unthinkable a few years back.

Innovation in the cloud is so rapid that developers can build a large variety of applications very efficiently. The ability to scale solutions on-demand and tear them down after use is very economical in multiple use cases. This permits projects to start small and scale up as demand goes up. Lastly, the cloud provides the ability to deploy applications globally in a manner that's consistent for both the end user and developers.

Essential cloud components for AI

Any cloud AI solution will have different components, all modular, individually elastic, and integrated with each other. A broad framework for cloud AI is depicted in the following diagram. At the very base is Storage, which is separate from Compute. This separation of Storage and Compute is one of the key benefits of the cloud, which permits the user to scale one separate from the other. Storage itself may be tiered based on throughput, availability, and other features. Until a few years back, the Compute options were limited to the speed and generation of the underlying CPU chips. Now, we have options for GPU and FPGA (short- for field-programmable gate array) chips as well. Leveraging Storage and Compute, various services are built on the cloud fabric, which makes it easier to use ingest data, transform it, and build models. Services based on Relational Databases, NoSQL, Hadoop, Spark, and Microservices are some of the most frequent ones used to build AI solutions:

Essential building blocks of cloud AI

At the highest level of complexity are the various AI-focused services that are available on the cloud. These services fall on a spectrum with fully customizable solutions at one end, and easy-to-build solutions at the other. Custom AI is typically a solution that allows the user to bring in their own libraries or use proprietary ones to build an end-to-end solution. This typically involves a lot of hands-on coding and gives the builder complete control over different parts of the solution. Pre-Built AI is typically in the form of APIs that expose some type of service that can be easily incorporated into your solution. Examples of these include custom vision, text, and language-based AI solutions.

However complex the underlying AI may be, the goal of most applications is to make the end user experience as seamless as possible. This means that AI solutions need to integrate with general applications that reside in the organization solution stack. A lot of solutions use Dashboards or reports in the traditional BI space. These interfaces allow the user to explore the data generated by the AI solution. Conversational Apps are usually in the form of an intelligent interface (such as a bot) that interacts with the user in a conversational mode.