AI as a Service: After Hardware and Software, You Can Also Rent Artificial Intelligence

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Renting software and hardware has been common in the tech scene for many years, and in the coming years, ‘AI as a Service’ (AIaaS), or renting artificial intelligence from a ‘third party’, will become increasingly established.

AIaaS allows individuals and companies to experiment with artificial intelligence for various purposes without significant initial investments and with minimal risk, either through a one-time payment per use or a subscription. Artificial intelligence is more accessible than ever, helping numerous companies with customer service, data analysis, and production automation.

It is important to emphasize that some AIaaS solutions do not require any coding skills, but it all depends on the level of complexity of the implementation, which varies greatly. Additionally, in most cases, solutions come to end-users fully ready for use without formal training.

The Most Common Types of AIaaS Solutions

Artificial intelligence is certainly a current ‘must-have’ in the market, but it is first necessary to determine what a particular company needs and for what artificial intelligence can be used.

The most common form of artificial intelligence currently is bots, and their most popular type is certainly chatbots, which are frequently discussed today. Chatbots use language processing algorithms to mimic natural conversation and are often used to provide customer service by giving relevant answers to frequently asked questions.

Since they respond 24 hours a day, seven days a week, they save time and resources, allowing employees to focus their time on more complex tasks. Accordingly, one of the fastest-growing European parcel delivery companies, InPost, recently reported that they automate as much as 92 percent of customer conversations processed each year through chatbots.

A frequently used solution is also Application Programming Interface, or API. This is a software ‘intermediary’ that allows two applications to ‘communicate’ with each other. An example is a flight booking website that pulls all information from a collection of databases of certain airlines to present all offers to end customers in one place.

Machine learning, or Machine Learning (ML), is also increasingly used for analyzing and finding patterns within certain data. It is an excellent tool for scientific and professional research, and this method of data analysis is usually performed with little or no human intervention.

Some AIaaS solutions are used for data labeling so that they can be effectively organized. From ensuring data quality to categorizing them by size, there is nothing artificial intelligence cannot do when it comes to data. The same goes for data classification, or labeling data under one or more categories.

Although it seems that artificial intelligence will completely replace humans, those who work with it do not think so.

‒ As a Data&AI company, we develop most of the artificial intelligence for other companies. Intelligent automation is here to help people by easing their daily lives. Once a person sees all the advantages they gain from using AI, integration into business goes smoothly. It is important to mention that in none of the AI applications have we completely eliminated humans. Humans are still critically needed in almost all business processes,‒ explained Martina Horvat, Growth Manager at bonsai.tech.

AI solutions from this Croatian company are used in various business segments, from recommendations for purchasing additional products and analyzing photographs of cars for sale to connecting outdated systems in banks.

‒ We have found that structured and clearly defined processes AI performs faster than humans and without errors caused by fatigue, and it is much more successful than us in analyzing large amounts of data,‒ concluded Horvat.

The Best AIaaS Providers

Due to their great potential, global tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon often publicly discuss the integration of artificial intelligence into their products, but they cannot really be described as AIaaS since their products are often complex, expensive, and non-transferable, requiring a significant amount of technical knowledge for setup. Since this contradicts the definition of AIaaS services, this is a perfect area for ‘small’ players to enter who narrow their offerings and focus on just one segment of AI technology.

The first example of such a company is the German Levity. The solution offered by Levity is essentially what AIaaS should be – user-friendly. While some basic knowledge of artificial intelligence will be useful, Levity does not require you to be an expert in the field. In fact, the goal of the tool is to ‘provide an intuitive and guided experience in all aspects, including what you need to know about artificial intelligence.’ It is a solution that should be adaptable to any office and allows for document classification.

Odus is also recognizable, a chatbot that enables the automation of calls and messages and offers complex scenarios while ‘playing’ with different entities. This is an American company that has been on the market since 2018.

Globally recognized is also the company Viz.ai, which specializes in applying artificial intelligence in healthcare. Although the Viz.ai tool was initially narrowly specialized for stroke patients, with the onset of the pandemic, a module was introduced to help control the influx of patients into institutions. This tool performs significant work in management, and besides reducing the time between diagnosis and treatment, during the pandemic, it also created a safer environment for staff.

Practical Experiences

Regardless of whether companies want to integrate the ‘most compatible’ tools into their business or not, the fact is that this will ultimately have to happen, and how it is when the integration of artificial intelligence into a company is not an optional but a necessary and purposeful step was explained by the company Martian & Machine.

‒ As a Venture Studio, we build startups from scratch, which often puts us in a position where we test many ideas to identify those with the highest potential. In this process, AI tools fit excellently as they allow us to reach results faster at various levels, starting from the conceptualization and drafting of the idea to the realization of the product at the level of research, design, and finally development,‒ said Marko Bosiljkov, co-founder of the company.

Departments of the company Martian & Machine decide for themselves which tools they want to include in their business and how, and the common denominator is always, claims Bosiljkov, speed, efficiency, and a simplified path to results. All employees of this company have access to paid Chat GPT Pro, and depending on which department they belong to, they also have other artificial intelligence tools at their disposal.

‒ The examples of using AI within our team are various. For instance, at the design level, Midjourney and various other AI tools prove excellent in creating visual content for specific requirements. They often shorten our path to solutions as we are able to generate it according to our wishes,‒ explained Bosiljkov, adding that they use it at the development level for learning new programming languages, and it has also proven good in writing SQL queries.

 ‒ Besides the learning level, we also use it in ‘debugging’ as it knows very well how to decipher errors in code and point them out,‒ said the co-founder of the company.

Bosiljkov emphasized that their main goal is to make artificial intelligence an everyday ally and to explore its boundaries, and he also stated that it is necessary to experiment as much as possible with such tools because only in this way can new paths for solving set problems be found. In all of this, Bosiljkov notes, one important premise must be kept in mind, which is that AI tools are not there to replace humans but to ease certain processes for them, as creativity in problem-solving remains the strongest human asset, while the use of artificial intelligence only supports it.