Published: May 11, 2022

what is AI as a service (AIaaS)

Artificial intelligence has significantly impacted businesses all around the world. It has improved products and customer experience and helped organisations formulate data-driven decisions that would massively impact their processes. 

Health, education, banking, business, and combat stimulation are just some of the economic industry sectors that have been positively affected by artificial intelligence. Tech giants can quickly access expensive AI-based solutions for those industries, but what about individuals and organisations who want to scale AI techniques but don’t have mountains of resources?

AI as a Service is becoming an ideal option for anyone who wants access to artificial intelligence without needing to establish an ultra-expensive infrastructure for themselves. AI solutions are becoming a norm for businesses who wish to gain insights from their valuable company data. With such a cost-effective solution available for anyone, it’s no surprise that AIaaS is starting to become a standard in most industries.

In this article, you will learn what AI as a Service is, its importance in the industry, the types available in the market, and how to determine if you need AIaaS for your organisation.

Artificial intelligence as a Service (AIaaS) is AI outsourcing offered by third-party providers. It’s a set of off-the-shelf solutions that can help businesses experiment with AI, implement it, and grow it at a fraction of the expense of building a custom in-house AI. It’s one of the emerging “as a service” offerings alongside other programs such as SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.

If AI weren’t so expensive, many companies would easily employ it and use it on their own data. However, that’s not the case, as AI can be so cost-prohibitive to most companies. Creating your own model would require massive machines and expert programmers, which can be too costly. Not to mention how some companies don’t even have sufficient data to study.

AIaaS allows access to AI through the cloud with minimal investment. It opens the doors for AI to individuals and companies looking forward to experimenting with AI, without spending as much and with minimal risks. Cloud AI service providers handle the necessary infrastructure and computer systems and allow users to access them through the cloud, including specialised hardware required to perform specific tasks, such as intensive workloads using powerful GPUs.

Thanks to APIs and low-code technologies, AIaaS allows users to harness the potential of AI without writing a single line of code. And instead of months, setting up the AIaaS solution of your choice will only take weeks. This level of convenience is valuable for businesses who are keen on scaling but don’t have the resources tech giants have.

Understanding AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a wide-ranging discipline of computer and data science that focuses on developing machines that can perform activities that typically need human intelligence. It can reason, learn from past experiences, and solve problems. 

Many would say that it is a way to give machines the ability to think like a human, and clearly, experts would see it as a controversial paradigm. But there’s more to AI than meets the eye, and the potential it brings to business is by no means noteworthy.

Thanks to the rapid advancement of technology, AI continuously surprises programmers because, just like humans, they can react to new and emerging challenges and can quickly adapt to them - in ways they didn’t explicitly program it to do.

AI uses algorithms to do its grunt work. Algorithms are a set of instructions intended to solve problems or perform tasks. They can do so by studying large amounts of data and making generalisations. Two of the most common types of AI algorithms are machine learning and deep learning algorithms. This article will cover more about machine learning and its role in AIaaS.

When used in a specific way, algorithms behave similarly to a human brain. Depending on the application, they can identify objects in a picture, spontaneously hold conversations with human beings, or even drive autonomous cars. Organisations can leverage this level of intelligence for their benefit. 

When used correctly, AI can give businesses insights that can help them better understand their customers. It can assist them to find the points in their processes ripe for automation. It can even help companies understand why some people buy their products and some don’t. Organisations can use AI’s insights and tangible information as a competitive edge.

Artificial intelligence as a service makes AI technology accessible to individuals and organisations for a minimal cost. With AIaaS, organisations can experiment with AI according to their needs and budget. This service is advantageous for companies without the means or resources to employ expensive in-house machines and software.

AI service providers can give companies access to their cloud AI platform, where you can build, test, and utilise the AI system of the third-party provider. The ability to gain massive data insights without heavily investing in talent and infrastructure is an opportunity all organisations should take advantage of.

Aside from minimal investments, AIaaS allows organisations to focus on their core business instead of trying to become data scientists and machine learning experts to operate an AI campaign.

The need to incorporate an AI service model into businesses is increasing due to three primary reasons:

1. Improving efficiencies with AI technology is not only cost-effective but is also much more sustainable.

2. Organisations that adopt AIaaS earlier than the others will have a significant advantage over their competitors.

3. The future of business optimisation will require more data, which means the AI algorithms will be far more helpful than today.

AIaaS is slowly transforming from a “nice to have” to an absolute necessity. The International Data Corporation even predicts that 75% of today’s commercial enterprises will leverage AI by 2021, which came true. Digital transformation can positively affect businesses and society as a whole - that is, if the latest technologies continue to be reachable and affordable. AIaaS can be a stepping stone for such a possibility.

There’s no doubt that leveraging AI capabilities for business optimisation is effective, but what can AIaaS bring to the table?

Scalability

If a company has optimisation needs that don’t require massive computing power, then AI solutions are the perfect service for them. AIaaS allows organisations to start with smaller projects to identify the right fit they require. They can easily do so if they need to scale up or down without procuring or relinquishing hardware and software tools.

Usability

Unlike setting up an in-house AI system or other AI solutions that are open source, AIaaS is user-friendly, quick and straightforward to set up and is available right outside of the box. This means that developers can allot more time on the more important matters, such as installing and developing the technology. Organisations can harness their power easily without any extensive technical expertise. 

Flexibility

Like most “as-a-service”, an AIaaS solution runs on a pay-as-you-go subscription. This is ideal if an organisation only needs to use the provider’s compute power for a short time. Transparency is also a fundamental value proposition for this service because it will only require payment for what an organisation uses - it’s improbable that they run AI non-stop.

Cost-Effectiveness

Employing the help of a third-party vendor means that organisations don’t need to spend to develop complex infrastructure, parallel machines and ultra-powerful GPUs anymore. At significantly lower costs, businesses can harness the power of AI and machine learning solutions without spending many resources. 

AIaaS also slashes off extra expenditures such as training and anything that supports partial decision-making. With these benefits in mind, organisations can now focus on their core business instead of wasting brainpower and resources on areas AIaaS can cover.

Vendors will offer you various types of AI services. Before diving into any AI services, an organisation must first know what they are looking for. Addressing the organisation’s pain points and identifying areas needing improvement is key to finding the correct type of service and vendor.

Here are three of the most well-known AIaaS solutions offered today.

1. Bots

Bots are arguably the most popular type of AI solution these days. You’ll see it used on multiple websites: from government websites to local eCommerce shops. You’ll likely encounter bots in your daily web surfing, particularly chatbots who are ready to provide digital assistance any time of the day.

Chatbots are software applications that use AI algorithms to simulate human-like conversations. They combine the power of machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to comprehend queries and provide relevant answers to them. Chatbots are primarily used for customer service, as they can quickly respond anytime.

With their 24/7 availability, chatbots act as virtual assistants and provide relevant responses to recurring questions. And with such a repetitive workload finally automated, involved customer service employees can now put more time into more complex tasks that need their attention. Chatbots are so effective that InPost, one of Europe’s leading parcel companies, reported that 92% of the millions of customer conversations they do annually are handled by chatbots.

Some examples of innovative chatbots include the following:

• Duolingo

• Whole Foods

• NatGeo Genius

• Facebook ChatBots

• MongoDB

2. APIs

Have you ever wondered how two different applications can efficiently work with one another? This is possible thanks to API (Application Programming Interface), a software application that acts as a middle-man between two applications for them to communicate. Cognitive services such as APIs allow developers to integrate a specific technology and AI service into their applications without writing any code from scratch.

Developers use APIs for various applications, such as Natural Language Processing API, which allows human-to-machine communication in their applications. Application programming interfaces can also perform complex but functional tasks like sentiment analysis and speech recognition. Other applications of APIs include computer vision, and conversational AI, to name a few.

Some of the most popular apps that use APIs are the following:

• Gmail

• Google Sheets

• Slack

• Notion

• OneDrive

3. Machine Learning Frameworks

Machine learning and AI frameworks are precious for companies that require insights from vast amounts of data without needing a large environment. These AI tools can make predictions that the developers didn’t specifically program them to. Such a level of data analysis is possible for machine learning frameworks with little to no human intervention at all.

Often associated with large amounts of data, machine learning has other applications. Developers use these AI tools to identify patterns from big data, make predictions, emotion detection, and make any complex process more streamlined.

AI services enable companies to use machine learning models without extensive technical skills. Many solutions providers offer pre-built models you can readily use to instruct it to perform specific AI tasks.

Some of the top machine learning frameworks with pre-trained models developers use are the following:

• PyTorch

• Spark ML

• Keras

• HuggingFace

• TensorFlow

Early adopters of AIaaS can leverage the benefits it can bring - way earlier than your competitors can. According to Deloitte’s State of the AI in the Enterprise, 82% of the companies that adopted AI early surveyed reported a positive return on their investments. 

Making your AI investments pay off is still a matter of skill proficiency. Industries such as technology, telecommunications, and media and entertainment, which are more than capable of handling complex AIaaS solutions, had an estimated median ROI of about 20% from their AI initiatives.

AI technology is widespread and rising among early adopters, with Delloite’s reports showing that the most complex technologies have the highest adoption level.

These technologies include:

• Machine Learning (63%)

• Natural Language Processing (62%)

• Computer Vision (57%)

• Deep Learning Neural Networks (50%)

Today, most businesses’ challenges are so complex that they need a helping hand from equally complex machines. This dilemma is where artificial intelligence can come into play. However, for organisations to achieve an actual return on their AI investments, they must have defined particular business outcomes. They must also understand the costs, cascading impacts, and talents they need to move forward with AI adoption.

AIaaS is a rapidly growing field, and there’s no better time to integrate AI into your business than it is now. AIaaS providers like NCS can help you build, deploy, and operate using AI. 

NCS' AiLevate.ai

NCS can provide you with a bespoke AI platform specifically tailored for you to maximise the benefits of your business’ AI transformation. Thanks to their unique AiLevate.ai platform, your business can quickly build, deploy, and operate at scale. 

The AiLevate.ai platform is agile, collaborative, and usable, perfect for organisations that want to train, build, test, and deploy AI models optimised explicitly for them.

The AI experts at NCS can offer you the following:

A Unified Management Platform. Preparing data, building, training, and deploying machine learning models and monitors can be easier with a unified platform. This platform can also automatically train those AI models, leading to an impressive performance at speed.

Data Readiness. Acquire a holistic view of your company with their rich set of data ingestion connectors, which they can connect to various external sources. They can also manage and format multiple data types for better processing and analysis.

Integrated MLOps. Deploying, serving, monitoring, and recalibrating your machine learning models can be easier by creating integrated workflows, which will allow you to benefit continuously from the performance of your current AI model.

AI implementation is slowly becoming necessary for organisations that want to scale and move forward with their business. However, making this technology accessible is no easy task, considering how cost prohibitive it can be for smaller companies without enough funds and data storage.

Good thing artificial intelligence as a service exists to give organisations who want to experiment with AI a chance to leverage the power of AI at a more affordable price. With AI as a Service, companies can find it easy to adopt machine learning technology to their processes. 

AIaaS allows organisations to leverage AI capabilities for business optimisation without finding seasoned talents with extensive technical capabilities or building an advanced infrastructure. Those who thought of adopting AI technology earlier were rewarded with positive returns on investment.

And although AI is still in its infancy, there’s no denying how great it has impacted the economy. Artificial intelligence offers practically unlimited possibilities, and it’s just a matter of time before data scientists can discover many more niches in the years to come.