JENIKIM Businesses today understand that AI or artificial intelligence brings a lot of benefits for the business’ growth. But the fact that adoption of AI solutions comes with challenges is undeniable. Companies contemplate on numerous things. Should you get a readily available option in the market or should you get AI solutions customized for the requirement? Would you be building your solution with a standard AI platform? To answer such questions and to take the right first step towards AI adoption you should work on your business’ AI Platform strategy.
Build or Buy or a Bit of both?
AI Platform Strategy for Your Business is one where you decide how your organization would acquire the required AI solutions. One option is to have an on-site team that creates and delivers the AI solutions from scratch. This would be a DIY approach and some organizations find this to be the most productive option. For others, considering the lack of experts in the field, outsourcing AI solutions or buying them from an external AI. And machine learning service provider would feel like a better choice. And finally, there is also the option to use the standard AI platforms to create subsets of solutions you require. Also, then piece together the various disconnected solutions to attain the ultimate objective.
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Building an AI solution in-house
The most straightforward AI Platform Strategy for Your Business is to create an in-house team for this. This gives you the full flexibility of creating the solution based on your concept. And making any number of revisions you need based on the requirements. There is also the benefit that no external team has access to the vulnerable data being access in the process.
The other main case where the in-house building of the AI solution feels relevant. Would be when there are a lot of complicated internal processes intertwined with the new solutions to be implemented. The ML code chunk would only be a small part of the infrastructure implementation. There is the issue of properly connecting the various components like analysis tools used by the organization, data collection interfaces, feature selection strategies, and more.
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Buying AI solutions for the organization
When it comes to AI Platform Strategy for Your Business, most organizations choose to buy AI solutions because of the long-term cost savings involved. Platform-as-a-service AI products are quicker and easier approaches for firms that are not already deep in the tech realm.
The main problem with building your own AI solutions is that there is a lot of investment upfront. Unlike tech firms who specialize in this area your organization might not already have the tools and resources for building the AI solutions. As a result, you can only start the process once you establish the essential infrastructure and there is a cost involve in doing this. After creating the infrastructure for it, if some internal decisions cause the project to be put on hold or postpone, then it would be a futile expense for the business. Unless you have proprietary data that you cannot risk sharing with an external team or a complicate model that is best containe internally, it would be good to outsource the process or go for an off-the-shelf AI solution.
Besides the rigid buy vs build approaches some also choose the hybrid model. But remember that disparate solutions built on different AI platforms might be difficult to connect. Unless you already have a strong infrastructure to support the new solutions it would be better to go with outsourcing the job.
Finalizing the AI platform strategy
Finally, after you have decided whether to buy AI solutions or build them here are some more aspects to think about –
- Machine learning tools available in the market are all different. Depending on the use cases you wish to focus on, pick the tools that help in targeting one function or offer end-to-end solutions.
- The machine learning infrastructure you choose should be implemented based on a strong plan. Transition can always be difficult in an established organization and when the people and processes in the infrastructure start interacting with the new solutions there could be a lot of friction. So, have a proper plan in place and then fix the AI Platform Strategy for Your Business or modify it wherever required.
- Every organization has different types of users and so the kind of AI solutions that work for one might not necessarily work for yours. So, make sure that you have a hybrid approach tuned for the resources in your organization. Whether you build your platform or buy one this holds good.
After all the efforts, when it comes to scaling, there might still be some hurdles. If you have chosen to buy your AI solutions you can always go back to the AI services company to help you choose the right approach for scaling. So, start small both with development and deployment and further expand the scope of the built solution.
