AI as a service (AIaaS)

Because hardware, software and staffing costs for AI can be expensive, many vendors are including AI components in their standard offerings or providing access to artificial intelligence as a service (AIaaS) platforms. AIaaS allows individuals and companies to experiment with AI for various business purposes and sample multiple platforms before making a commitment.


                Popular AI cloud offerings include the following:
                    

                    
                    

            


Examples of AI

Automation. When paired with AI technologies, automation tools can expand the volume and types of tasks performed. An example is robotic process automation (RPA), a type of software that automates repetitive, rules-based data processing tasks traditionally done by humans. When combined with machine learning and emerging AI tools, RPA can automate bigger portions of enterprise jobs, enabling RPA's tactical bots to pass along intelligence from AI and respond to process changes.

                 Machine learning. This is the science of getting a computer to act without
                    programming. Deep
                    learning is a subset of machine learning that, in very simple terms, can be thought of as the
                    automation of predictive analytics. There are three types of machine learning algorithms:
                
    Supervised learning. Data sets are labeled so that patterns can be detected and used to label new data sets.
    
                        Unsupervised learning. Data sets aren't labeled and are sorted according
                            to similarities
                            or
                            differences.
                        
    
                         Reinforcement learning. Data sets aren't labeled but, after performing
                            an action or
                            several actions,
                            the AI system is given feedback.
                    


                  Machine vision. This technology gives a machine the ability to see.
                    Machine vision captures and
                    analyzes visual information using a camera, analog-to-digital conversion and digital signal
                    processing. It is often compared to human eyesight, but machine vision isn't bound by biology
                    and
                    can be programmed to see through walls, for example. It is used in a range of applications from
                    signature identification to medical image analysis. Computer vision, which is focused on
                    machine-based image processing, is often conflated with machine vision.
                


                  Natural language processing. This is the processing of human language by a
                    computer program. One of
                    the older and best-known examples of NLP is spam detection, which looks at the subject line and
                    text
                    of an email and decides if it's junk. Current approaches to NLP are based on machine learning.
                    NLP
                    tasks include text translation, sentiment analysis and speech recognition.
                


                 Robotics.This field of engineering focuses on the design and manufacturing
                    of robots. Robots are
                    often used to perform tasks that are difficult for humans to perform or perform consistently.
                    For
                    example, robots are used in assembly lines for car production or by NASA to move large objects
                    in
                    space. Researchers are also using machine learning to build robots that can interact in social
                    settings.
                


                  Self-driving cars. Autonomous vehicles use a combination of computer
                    vision, image recognition and
                    deep learning to build automated skill at piloting a vehicle while staying in a given lane and
                    avoiding unexpected obstructions, such as pedestrians.