AI as a Service (AIaaS) – An Overview

What is AIaaS

The concept of AI is to replicate and then exceed the way humans perceive and react to the world. A study by McKinsey shows that AI will contribute 13 trillion USD to the world economy and raise the cumulative GDP by 16% by 2030.

AI is the need of the hour, of course!

Investing in AI, however, is expensive, and therefore not accessible to most companies. Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS) allows companies to adopt and implement AI solutions without much investment and with lower risk. AIaaS offers a variety of AI tools via third-party outsourcing as a standard package.

aiaas-stack

AIaaS stack aligned with standard cloud service stack (cf. Liu et al. 2011; Mell and Grance 2011)

Types of AIaaS

With various types of AI services, one has the option to choose what fits best per business needs. Choosing a solution that does not require extensive prior knowledge to start using AIaaS is always helpful.

Given below are some popular offerings of AIaaS solutions.

  1. Bots: A chatbot can simulate human-like conversation using AI algorithms. A delicate blend of NLP and ML capabilities can help understand user intent and offer much-needed responses. Today, bots are creating waves in customer care by reducing first-time response rates and boosting customer satisfaction. Europe’s fastest-growing parcel company, InPost, reported that they automate as many as 92% of the millions of customer conversations they handle each year by leveraging a chatbot.
  2. Application Programming Interface (API): AIaaS solutions offer exciting APIs, as a way for services to communicate with each other and allow two pieces of software to interact. Today, APIs for NLP can extract entities from text, among other tasks. APIs served “as-a-service” can be adopted and used instantly with developers writing minimal lines of code.
  3. Machine Learning: ML and AI frameworks are popular tools that are used to build models, find patterns in large amounts of data, make predictions, and streamline processes. With AIaaS, businesses will find it easy to adopt ML technology by using trained models or customized tools to suit their needs. All this, without any prior ML proficiency.

In the next part, we’ll explore the impact of AIaaS by understanding why businesses today must invest in artificial intelligence.

Author Details

Anish Sharma

Anish, a Technology Architect at Infosys Digital Experience, is adept at modern web concepts, frontend technologies, design/architecture paradigm. He helps enterprises to meet their digital transformation goals by leveraging his diverse technical and leadership skills.

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