AI Must Play a Role in Data Cloud Management

The disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic highlights how critical it is to continually seek new approaches to survive, corner competition, and empower business futures ahead of major market disruptions. Given the modern demands of technology to deliver on a wide swath of services, products and solutions, data has come to play a major role in monetization. It’s no surprise that so many have begun to realize their success as a business depends upon their ability to improve collection and uses of datasets.

Data intelligence, or the use of data to glean useful information, allows a business to both increase revenue and their position in the market. But the continual multiplication of data and its sources are making an already substantial challenge even more laborious.

AI can accelerate business time to value

This emphasis on data is where artificial intelligence (AI) can play an especially useful role. By leveraging the cloud and AI for the storage, collection, and analysis of data, a business can monetize information in a fast, effective manner. Indeed, mastering data management through the use of the cloud will continue to be top of mind for many IT groups as they are asked more and more to improve business agility through the fostering of better business intelligence. Thus, data science -- the large umbrella under which AI, machine learning, automation, data storage, and more all fall within -- will see huge leaps in growth both this year and in the years ahead.

The cloud is perfectly positioned to assist organizations in AI because of its unique ability to provide business with flexibility, agility, scalability, and speed that other models of infrastructure simply can’t achieve at the same level. If the core of a business isn’t managing a datacenter, then the cloud is all the more appealing, since it allows IT teams to focus on the value-driving projects that will truly make a difference for employees and customers. AI is one of many innovations to get there, and the cloud is the foundation upon which to enable AI to do its work.

The objective with using the cloud for AI is to help accelerate analytics, but also avoid data siloes where information becomes difficult to leverage because it’s sprawled into hard-to-reach locations. Data must be readily accessible, yet secure, which is why the cloud can be an ideal candidate.

Why AI as a service will become the norm

The downside of AI is that it’s expensive to provision on your own, especially since it means hiring data scientists to be successful. Therefore, many businesses will forego the self-service route in favor of a third-party partner to derive value. With an AI as a service approach, companies will be able use AI for their own data science projects without the steep costs.

The global value of the AI market will surpass more than an estimated $89 billion annually by 2025, according to Statista. This value will only increase the more artificial intelligence continues to power cloud computing. In return, cloud computing will act as an engine to boost the impact AI can have in the larger market, including a range of industries. A recent McKinsey study showed AI could create $3.5 trillion and $5.8 trillion per year in value in 19 business areas and more than 400 potential use cases.

As you look to the future, keep in mind that AI will play a key role for business competitiveness, so you should be planning for how best to leverage AI now. Cloud is the perfect environment to begin using AI on datasets since its flexibility and scalability lends itself well for any necessary pivoting to embrace challenges.

Jeff Ton is the Founder of Ton Enterprises and Strategic IT Advisor to InterVision, a leading IT strategic service provider and Premier Consulting Partner in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN).