Artificial Intelligence as a Service: Trends to Look Out for in 2021
Artificial intelligence helps businesses enhance user and product experiences, make data-backed decisions, and automate time-consuming tasks. From chatbots to more sophisticated predictive analytics tools, a diverse range of AI applications has been developed over the years.
However, building a complete AI system is a risk not worth taking for some businesses, as the process is entirely complex and money-draining. These scenarios have made several companies adopt AIaaS, as it provides ready-to-use third-party applications.
Artificial Intelligence as a Service: An Overview
Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS) operates from a hosted service provider. The technology is cost-effective and an alternative to developing in-house software. It makes AI accessible to everyone either through low-code tools or APIs to harness AI-related services without the knowledge of writing code.
AIaaS is an excellent money-saving asset in every business environment. For instance, if you are a transportation and logistics business owner, and your venture grows and acquires more customers, you will need to hire more employees to take care of the increasing amounts of data. Organizations are leveraging advanced mechanisms like Intelligent Process as a Service to power their processes.
With AIaaS services at your disposal, you will not have to employ more staff as the AIaaS programs are designed to collect, analyze, and provide solutions from vast amounts of data.
Almost every major business that is succeeding today is leveraging AI to make their processes more efficient.
PayPal, for example, is using cutting-edge artificial intelligence to combat money laundering. Users’ purchasing history is mined for patterns of fraud, and algorithms can teach PayPal if a suspicious transaction was an innocent action by someone traveling abroad who accessed their account from different countries. This is helping the fintech giant keep its fraud rate as low as 0.32% of the revenue, according to a report by LeanIX.
No matter which industry you’re from, you can leverage AIaaS to integrate the power of artificial intelligence in your work without having to do a complete in-house set-up.
AIaaS and IoT
Extensive use of Artificial Intelligence and its services has led to discovering several ways that the technology can be put into good use in businesses.
The Internet of Things (IoT) rose from the synergy of complex Artificial Intelligence and business processes to create a platform that could provide solutions from collecting and analyzing data available.
Some popular IoT applications are in the control of devices like Alexa, self-driving cars, and robots. According to Fracttal, we can come across IoT in wearables like fitness bands and virtual glasses that monitor heartbeats and calorie expenditure. Other everyday wearables are GPS tracking belts that constantly collect your location’s information and save the data in the cloud. The data collected by these wearables are fed to their manufacturers’ servers like Samsung and is analyzed to create organized data and information about the wearable users.
Use Case of AIaaS
AIaaS delivers its services in a wide array of applications with the main ones being machine learning platforms, Bots and APIs. Chatbots are the most common. Bots use the combination of Neuro-Linguistic Programming and Machine Learning to correctly analyze user queries and respond in the most accurate way possible. The use of Bots in businesses brings about a positive revolution as they can handle customer queries on a 24/7 basis and provide relevant solutions.
APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) allow two software pieces to interact. Through an API, you can connect a tool like MonkeyLearn, Intercom, Chatfuel, and various other online chatbot tools to customer care service to provide the customer with more helpful information. AIaaS also helps companies benefit from Machine Learning algorithms and analyze large amounts of data to offer amicable business solutions.
AIaaS enables organizations to integrate Machine Language services into their processes without any experience and expertise in Machine Learning.
The AIaaS services are not just for big companies.
Other use cases of the AIaaS include:
- Small businesses who want to take on challenges in their industry without hiring new employees or outsourcing employment positions to techies who know how to handle machine learning based software
- Individuals who just don’t have enough time, skills, and knowledge to operate machine learning algorithms or capital to integrate machine learning into their work
For these and hundreds of other purposes, AIaaS works like magic!
AIaaS Trends in 2021
Continued use of Artificial Intelligence has sparked new ideas among developers to make the market even more automated. As a result, we are witnessing a massive makeover within AI in the recent past, and the trend grows day by day.
With the ability to access the cloud service, AI and AIaaS services can manipulate vast amounts of data and solutions in a way that was almost unthinkable in the past. For instance, AI tools have been integrated in the healthcare industry to help in detecting lymph nodes in the human body through Computer Tomography, something no one would have thought possible in the past.
This report by Technavio highlights how AIaaS is growing at a rapid pace and is being implemented extensively across different areas of business.
The trends definitely seem to be climbing an upward hill in 2021 and beyond.
It is a no-brainer that AIaaS is transitioning from an elite feature in our businesses to a mainstream tool in our day-to-day operations. According to a study by Compunnel Digital, over 70% of people use AI differently in 2021. The automation era has pushed AI’s inclusion in virtually every field, with a projection that its global market will hit $190.61 billion by 2025, reveals a study by Markets and Markets.
The future of AIaaS promises a completely digitized business market. According to a report by Teks, most western countries have largely adopted AIaaS, with North America leading the revolution with a 46% fraction of the global AIaaS use.
Europe comes second with a 28% share and Asia-pacific sharing the remaining portion with the rest of the world. The global demand for AIaaS is expected to rise as more people understand the potential of embracing artificial intelligence to make business environments more efficient.
More than 60% of professional digital market investors believe that AI is the most important tool in their digital strategies. The ability to indirectly use AI services without incurring high costs popularized the use of AIaaS on a global scale. Moreover, AIaaS has been proved to raise productivity by around 40%
IoT, on the other hand, is also another prominent tech trend and continues to open up a world of AI-related opportunities in the future. From its popularity in use among businesses and households, IoT’s growth will directly affect the day-to-day life of an individual or organization.
For instance, the IoT industry is seeking to enhance working from home, through the introduction of services like the AI-powered personal assistant, Alexa. IoT also comes in handy to ease more work-from-home activities, like improving intelligence-automated calendar and scheduling tools, providing better video-conferencing and interaction platforms, and the virtual meeting technology like the hologram meeting.
In 2021 and beyond, it is an expectation that IoT advances to find more ways to enhance remote working
Moreover, IoT has an upper hand at streamlining operations in business stores and supermarkets, by using AI algorithms to collect vast amounts of randomized data to provide quality tools like targeted ads to specific customers. Especially during the pandemic, IoT is being used to track the movements of customers around their stores as well as monitor spaces and ensure social distancing in overcrowded store areas.
We expect to see AIaaS and IoT to grow spontaneously in the near future. It is evident in how companies have managed to lean on it to make a step towards achieving efficacy and rogue competition power.
Takeaway
With the fast-changing customer needs in the recent past, AIaaS has been a supportive factor in providing bias-free solutions, innovative ideas, and raising possible security risks that will be used in providing long-term solutions. With the self-improvement nature of AIaaS, we can say that it will be one of the most compelling technology trends in 2021 and later years.
If you’re planning to power your organization’s processes with advanced AI, let Zabda be your trusted technology solutions partner. Reach out to us today!