Why Cloud is Important to the Success of AI Initiatives

What’s it about?

This whitepaper shows how the cloud, especially the public cloud, helps to successfully develop, implement, and operate modern AI solutions.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a key technology for the digital transformation and will help determine the competitiveness of German companies. Many companies have recognized the potential of AI for their business, but still struggle with the application, deployment, and scaling of AI products. Development and implementation of AI imposes high demands onto companies, such as powerful computing, storage, and network infrastructure. This requires not only methodological expertise in machine learning, but also the know-how to technically implement and operate AI solutions. These requirements present companies with major hurdles. With the help of the cloud, however, many of these hurdles can be overcome. The cloud is both a driver and enabler of AI in enterprises. It offers almost unlimited scalability and flexibility, as well as other advantages that make AI easier to deploy.

Companies that use the cloud have easy access to the latest technologies, without having to make risky investments. Often, a few clicks are all it takes to build a powerful infrastructure – and discard it when it’s no longer needed.

Regardless of the use case, the cloud enables an agile and flexible workflow at transparent and predictable costs. Ultimately, even with the cloud, AI expertise is a big advantage, but it’s no longer absolutely necessary. This is because all major cloud providers offer beginner-friendly services that enable anyone to use AI “off-the-shelf“. These services range from automated machine learning to APIs for image recognition, to chatbots that can be deployed in a few simple steps. While this does not replace expertise in AI, it massively lowers the barriers to entry for successful AI projects.