It is without a doubt that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen a significant rise in adoption over the last few years
With businesses increasingly under pressure to optimise their processes and stay ahead of competitors by adopting the latest technologies, it is no wonder that they have turned to AI for help.
AI has the ability to immerse itself within various areas of business including planning, learning, speech recognition and problem solving. ‘AI’ is a broad term which covers everything from process automation to robots, and enables a business to identify the underlying patterns in data, whilst being able to gain more insights and automate certain tasks. In the last few years, AI has come into its own and can now complete tasks more quickly, accurately and efficiently than humans.
The technology is already being used widely throughout a number of industries. For example, it has already drastically improved the healthcare industry through optimising tools for early diagnostics. Furthermore, the finance industry has seen benefits from AI-based process automation and fraud detection.
Benefits of Artificial Intelligence
AI can be further broken down into specific sections, such as Machine Learning and Robotic Process Automation, which will each have different processes depending upon the need to service core functions for a business. Machine Learning is essentially deep diving into datasets in order to study patterns or apply ‘learning processes’ to these datasets for sorting before passing on to AI system. It is able to classify data into a binary ‘yes/no’ system in order to aid businesses in daily activities such as order processing and credit check systems.
Robotic Process Automation, otherwise known as RPA, is another form of AI, where its technology is aimed at automating business processes. Using RPA tools, a company can configure software to capture and interpret data for processing a transaction, communicating with other digital systems, and much more. RPA is ideal for back office automation which, as a result, can free up employees to work on more creative tasks and increase their productivity. However, depending on the RPA’s remit, it can be quite resource intensive for processing, as well as generating a significant amount of data.
All Artificial Intelligence related processes require additional resources from IT infrastructure in terms of processing power, memory and data storage due to the extremely high amounts of data produced by AI. With spending on AI estimated to reach $52.2 billion in 2021, it is vital for companies to first have the correct systems in place to support the technology, and avoid investing in unnecessary hardware. In order to roll out the technology, businesses must first implement a number of processes to prepare.
Taking advantage of the cloud
This is where businesses can move their processes to the cloud to take full advantage of its on-tap scalability, rapid implementation, predictability, and low risk. Its value proposal far outweighs the need to invest in depreciating and heavy management overhead of on-premise IT assets. The rise of low cost data storage systems, both cloud and non-cloud, which can be rented per hour has driven cloud adoption to become more popular than ever.
On-premise systems, which are located physically on site, not only require manual checks and human input to upgrade each system, but also often need to be updated, which not only takes time to process and research, but also requires downtime during the update.
Cloud computing requires minimal expense on items which would typically have to be purchased for on-premise systems, such as hardware, and therefore avoids the expenditure of upgrading and repairing these items. Furthermore, the technology does not need the same level of updates which often delay a company’s processes, thus saving crucial time. AI also requires a big amount of data to enable machine learning capabilities, cloud providers can enable quicker AI integration by providing this.
Cloud computing typically consumes less power and is much more efficient than having servers which require additional components to ensure their maintenance. Off-premise systems can completely utilise hardware and therefore require less power whilst also demanding less expense.
Optimising user experience
Integrating AI applications and processes within a business involves both significant financial and time investment. The assessment of the correct solutions, deployment and training required must all be factored in, if the project is to be successful. This investment could potentially be wasted if the AI applications are ultimately difficult to access for the workforce, especially when working remotely, which is now commonplace in businesses of all sectors.
Allowing businesses to interact securely with their AI applications with ease is vital, and having limited availability can hold up processes within the business. A way to address this is to turn to the cloud to optimise the infrastructure underpinning it and remote access abilities.
In doing so, businesses can ensure that their systems can communicate and operate with each other, whilst producing the best possible output for a business. The user experience is extremely important in AI and it should be reducing the time spent by employees using various applications, not prolonging them. Through the cloud, users can access systems with ease and can also view these from anywhere in the world, at any time.
With the rapid rate of the adoption of AI expected to continue, it is vital that businesses ensure they have the correct technology in place to successfully roll out Artificial Intelligence within their processes in order to make the most of the advantages that various systems such as Machine Learning and Robotic Process Automation can provide. Through moving their processes to the cloud, businesses can ensure that they are ready to take on the huge amounts of data and resources taken up by Artificial Intelligence.
About the Author
Dominik Birgelen is CEO of oneclick. The oneclick™ Workspace Provisioning and Streaming Platform lets you easily provision and deliver applications and data from any server location via a central platform into a workspace in the browser. oneclick comes as a service and is hence instantly available without the need to install anything locally on servers or end user devices.
