There’s a reason we can make AI work for small businesses

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that huge technology firms are leading the way on artificial intelligence development. From large research universities like Carnegie Mellon to the power players like Google, Facebook and Amazon, it makes sense that the bleeding edge of computer advancement comes from those with the computational horsepower to make it so. So how does a company like ours make it work for small businesses? Because when it comes to actually putting AI to work, the big boys don’t have stranglehold on those applications at all. Anyone with the right knowhow can use AI to their advantage. Here’s how:

The aaS-ing of the modern economy

Over the past decade or two, many enterprise functions have moved away from large-scale hardware or software purchases to subscription models. Software as a Service, or SaaS, has come to dominate the business model and operating relationship between service providers and consumers in so many ways. Instead of building and maintaining a local server for your company computer backups, website hosting, etc., we now has AWS or Azure for that. You rent the space and the infrastructure to support all those functions are handled.

Things like Adobe’s entire creative suite have moved away from prohibitive, multi-thousand dollar per user up-front payments to a monthly subscription. Even things like office space have moved away from requiring self-reliance when WeWorks can house small businesses before they’re ready to take over or build their own space. That subscription-ification of the modern economy has extended beyond just cloud storage or software suites, but to computing power as well. And that’s where we come in.

Power for purchase

Amazon Web Services and their brethren from Microsoft, IBM, Google, Oracle and so forth ushered in a new era for decentralized computing. And with the exponential growth in speed and capability for AI, many of these same companies are renting out AI availability and horsepower much as they did with cloud storage. That puts AI within reach of businesses small and massive alike. When it comes down to it, there are only ever going to be a handful of companies with the resources, expertise and inclination to build AI neural networks and machine learning processing centers. But once they’ve built those things, there’s no reason why they can’t rent out the excess/unused computational capabilities, which is precisely what some of these companies have done.

In a lot of ways, this has leveled the playing field, because small enterprises have every bit as much access to the tech as large enterprises do. Now, they may not be able to afford as much power for as long, but the access is still there for the renting. But no matter what, it provides anyone with the inclination to integrate AI into their product offering the ability to do so.

That’s how we’re able to harness the power of AI and put it to work for our clients. It’s why we can give them a competitive advantage unmatched in their industry segment. We use the aaS-ification of the modern economy to our and our clients’ benefits, partnering with the AI leaders in the space to integrate those functionalities into digital solutions many consumers wouldn’t expect from companies as small as we sometimes work with.  It really is a testament to all that’s possible today, and paints a bright picture for tomorrow.

If you’d like to learn how we could put AI to work for you, please feel free to reach out any time!