How to Scale AI in Your Business 2023
To effectively scale AI, company executives must create and empower specialized, committed teams capable of focusing on high-value strategic goals that only their team can achieve. Allow data scientists to perform data science, engineers to do engineering, and IT to concentrate on infrastructure.
What is the future of artificial intelligence in business?
AI may be used in manufacturing, retail, telecommunications, and information technology in the future. AI technologies promise to improve product quality, manage inventory, reduce downtime, and provide real-time forecasting is propelling these enterprises forward. Here are three ways that companies are using AI today.
How do I integrate AI into my business?
AI is permeating practically every industry's goods and operations. However, most firms continue to struggle with integrating AI at scale.
Businesses may help assure the success of their artificial intelligence projects by growing personnel, processes, and technologies in an integrated, coherent way. This is all part of a new field known as MLOps.
AI is no longer only for digital natives like Amazon, Netflix, or Uber. Dow Chemical Company has employed machine learning to speed up its R&D process for polyurethane formulations by 200,000 times—from 2-3 months to 30 seconds. Dow is not alone in this.
The latest Deloitte index demonstrates how firms across industries are using AI to achieve commercial value. Unsurprisingly, Gartner estimates that by the end of 2024, more than 75% of enterprises will have moved from testing AI technologies to operationalizing them—which is where the real issues begin.
When AI is operationalized at scale, it is most beneficial. Scale refers to how deeply and widely AI is built into the core product or service and business processes of an organization. This is important for business executives who want to maximize business value through AI.
Unfortunately, scaling AI in this way is difficult. Putting one or two AI models into production is not the same as basing a whole organization or product on AI.
Problems may (and often do) grow when AI is scaled. One financial firm, for example, lost $20,000 in 10 minutes when one of its machine learning models started to misbehave.
The company was forced to shut down due to a lack of knowledge about the root cause and no way of determining which of its products was failing. All of the models were rolled back to much older generations, which made them much less effective and erased weeks of work.
Organizations that are serious about AI have begun to embrace a new discipline known as "MLOps," or Machine Learning Operations.
MLOps aims to provide best practices and technologies to enable the quick, safe, and efficient development and deployment of AI.
When properly applied, MLOps may drastically accelerate time to market. MLOps implementation requires spending time and money on three critical areas: procedures, people, and technologies.
Processes - Standardize how models are built and operationalized
Building the models and algorithms that underpin AI is a creative process that involves iteration and improvement on a regular basis. Data scientists prepare the data, construct features, train the model, fine-tune its parameters, and evaluate its functionality.
When the model is ready for deployment, software engineers and IT operationalize it, continuously checking output and performance to guarantee the model functions reliably in production.
Lastly, a governance team needs to keep an eye on the whole process to make sure the AI model being built is ethical and follows the rules.
Given the complexities involved, the first step toward making AI scale is standardization: a method for building repeatable models and a well-defined procedure for operationalizing them.
In this sense, developing AI is similar to manufacturing: The initial widget a firm produces is always unique; expanding production to generate a large number of widgets and then continually refining their design is where a repeatable development and manufacturing process become critical. However, with AI, many businesses struggle with this procedure.
It's easy to see why. Bespoke procedures are (by definition) inefficient. However, many businesses fall into the trap of recreating the wheel each time they implement a model.
In the example of the financial business mentioned above, the absence of a repeatable method to evaluate model performance resulted in costly and time-consuming failures.
Once research models are pushed into production, one-time operations like this might cause major problems.
The process standardization part of MLOps makes it easier to create, implement, and improve models. This lets teams create AI capabilities quickly and in a responsible way.
To standardize, businesses should establish a "recommended" method for AI development and operationalization jointly and offer tools to assist its implementation.
For example, the organization may provide a standardized set of libraries for validating AI models, thereby promoting uniform testing and validation.
Standardization is especially important at handoff points in the AI lifecycle, like when data science moves to IT.
This is because it lets different teams work independently and focus on their core skills without having to worry about unplanned, disruptive changes.
Model Catalogs and Feature Stores are MLOps tools that may help with this standardization.
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People: Allow teams to concentrate on their strengths
AI development used to be the job of an AI "data science" team, but producing AI at scale involves a range of distinct skill sets, and relatively few people possess all of them. A data scientist, for example, develops algorithmic models that can reliably and consistently predict behavior, while an ML engineer optimizes, bundles, and integrates research models into products and continuously analyzes their quality. Rarely does one person perform effectively in both jobs.
Compliance, governance, and risk each need a separate set of competencies. As AI becomes more sophisticated, more expertise is needed.
To effectively grow AI, company executives must create and empower specialized, committed teams capable of focusing on high-value strategic goals that only their team can achieve. Allow data scientists to perform data science, engineers to do engineering, and IT to concentrate on infrastructure.
As firms expand their AI footprint, two team architectures have arisen. The first is the "pod model," in which AI product development is handled by a small team comprised of a data scientist, data engineer, and ML or software developer.
The second approach, the "Center of Excellence" (COE), is when a company "pools" all data science professionals, who are then allocated to various product teams based on needs and resource availability.
Both systems have been effectively adopted and have various advantages and disadvantages. The pod model is best suited for rapid execution, but it might result in knowledge silos, while the COE model has the reverse tradeoff. Governance teams, on the other hand, do their best when they are not part of pods or COEs. This is not the case for data science and IT teams.
Select tools that promote creativity, speed, and safety.
Finally, we get to tools. Given that standardizing AI and ML production is a relatively new undertaking, the ecosystem of data science and machine learning technologies is extremely fragmented—to develop a single model, a data scientist uses approximately a dozen separate, highly specialized tools and knits them together.
On the other hand, IT or governance, on the other hand, employs an entirely different set of tools, and these various toolchains do not readily communicate with one another. As a consequence, doing one-off work is simple, but creating a strong, recurring process is tough.
As a result, the rate at which AI may be scaled throughout an organization has slowed. A random collection of tools could make it take longer to get AI products to market and make them harder to control.
However, as AI spreads across a business, teamwork becomes increasingly important to success.
Faster iteration necessitates continual input from stakeholders throughout the model's lifespan, and identifying the right tool or platform is a critical first step. AI tools and platforms at scale must promote innovation, speed, and safety. Without the proper tools, a company will struggle to maintain all of them at the same time.
A leader should consider the following factors while selecting MLOps technologies for their organization:
Interoperability
Most of the time, there will already be some AI infrastructure in place. Choose a new tool that will work with the current ecosystem to decrease friction in adoption.
On the production side, model services must use DevOps technologies that have previously been validated by IT (e.g., tools for logging, monitoring, and governance).
Ascertain that new tools will be compatible with the current IT environment or that they can be quickly expanded to offer this support. Since moving to the cloud could take years, companies that are moving from on-premise infrastructure to the cloud should look for technologies that will work in a hybrid setup.
It is still unclear whether it is appropriate for both data science and IT.
Scaling Instruments The three main groups of people who use AI are the data scientists who build models; the IT teams who maintain the AI infrastructure and run AI models in production; and the governance teams who watch how models are used in regulated situations.
Data science and IT, in particular, have contradictory demands. To allow data scientists to perform their best job, a platform must get out of the way, allowing them to utilize the libraries of their choice and operate autonomously without continual IT or technical assistance.
It needs a platform that enforces limits and guarantees that production deployments adhere to predetermined and IT-approved pathways.
A good MLOps platform will be able to accomplish both. Most of the time, this problem can be solved by choosing one platform for model development and another platform for model implementation.
Collaboration
As previously stated, AI is a multi-stakeholder endeavor. As a consequence, an MLOps product must make it simple for data scientists to collaborate with engineers, and for both of these personas to collaborate with governance and compliance. Knowledge exchange and sustaining company continuity in the face of staff turnover are critical in the year of the Great Resignation.
While the pace of cooperation between data science and IT defines the speed to market for AI products, governance collaboration assures that the product being developed is one that should be built at all.
Governance
Governance is far more important in AI and ML than in other applications. AI Governance is more than simply application security and access control.
It is in charge of verifying that an application complies with an organization's ethical code, that the program is not prejudiced against a protected group, and that the AI application's choices can be trusted.
Because of this, every MLOps solution must include standards for ethical and responsible AI, like "pre-launch" checklists for ethical AI use, model documentation, and governance protocols.
Leaders are continuously seeking methods to pull ahead of the pack in the race to grow AI and achieve greater commercial value via predictive technologies.
Pre-trained models and licensed APIs may be beneficial in and of themselves, but scaling AI for optimum ROI necessitates a focus on how businesses operationalize AI.
Even if a business has the best models or the smartest data scientists, that doesn't mean it will be successful. Instead, success will go to those who can use and improve AI in a smart way to reach its full potential.
Interoperability
Most of the time, there will already be some AI infrastructure in place. Choose a new tool that will work with the current ecosystem to decrease friction in adoption.
On the production side, model services must use DevOps technologies that have previously been validated by IT (e.g., tools for logging, monitoring, and governance).
Ascertain that new tools will be compatible with the current IT environment or that they can be quickly expanded to offer this support.
Since moving to the cloud could take years, companies that are moving from on-premise infrastructure to the cloud should look for technologies that will work in a hybrid setup.
It is still unclear whether it is appropriate for both data science and IT.
Scaling Instruments The three main groups of people who use AI are the data scientists who build models; the IT teams who maintain the AI infrastructure and run AI models in production; and the governance teams who watch how models are used in regulated situations.
Data science and IT, in particular, have contradictory demands. To allow data scientists to perform their best job, a platform must get out of the way, allowing them to utilize the libraries of their choice and operate autonomously without continual IT or technical assistance.
It needs a platform that enforces limits and guarantees that production deployments adhere to predetermined and IT-approved pathways.
A good MLOps platform will be able to accomplish both. Most of the time, this problem can be solved by choosing one platform for model development and another platform for model implementation.
Collaboration
As previously stated, AI is a multi-stakeholder endeavor. As a consequence, an MLOps product must make it simple for data scientists to collaborate with engineers, and for both of these personas to collaborate with governance and compliance.
Knowledge exchange and sustaining company continuity in the face of staff turnover are critical in the year of the Great Resignation.
While the pace of cooperation between data science and IT defines the speed to market for AI products, governance collaboration assures that the product being developed is one that should be built at all.
Governance
Governance is far more important in AI and ML than in other applications.
AI Governance is more than simply application security and access control. It is in charge of verifying that an application complies with an organization's ethical code, that the program is not prejudiced against a protected group, and that the AI application's choices can be trusted.
Because of this, every MLOps solution must include standards for ethical and responsible AI, like "pre-launch" checklists for ethical AI use, model documentation, and governance protocols.
Leaders are continuously seeking methods to pull ahead of the pack in the race to grow AI and achieve greater commercial value via predictive technologies.
Pre-trained models and licensed APIs may be beneficial in and of themselves, but scaling AI for optimum ROI necessitates a focus on how businesses operationalize AI.
Even if a business has the best models or the smartest data scientists, that doesn't mean it will be successful. Instead, success will go to those who can use and improve AI in a smart way to reach its full potential.