Democratization of AI in the Enterprise

Two megatrends – industrialization of AI platforms and democratization of AI – indicate that production workloads and high-scale AI applications are looming in the near future.  We recently published for the wide audience 2 Megatrends Dominate the Gartner Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence, 2020.  I wrote about industrialization of AI in my previous blog post. Now, let’s talk about democratization of AI.

Early adopters were like bicyclists: Data scientists put a lot of effort developing solutions from scratch to get to the destination – delivering value to their companies. Like bicycling, AI was exciting and took early adopters to the unknown places. This is the time of the enterprise in AI. Many enterprises are already running AI solutions and appreciate their fruits, but now, they want to get to the next level of AI benefits by delivering AI value at scale. The enterprise’s goals are to move fast, via known routes and serve a lot of people. Such a shift is what causes the megatrends of industrialization of AI and democratization of AI. Enterprises need a bus – a modern, industrialized AI platform. Production deployments require scale, predictability and automation.The bus – an industrialized AI platform – is a public transportation. It can take many more people and with more comfort. Its driver has a license and passengers have tickets.The bus goes on schedule and has designated stops, but the bike can go where the bus cannot. So, the best approach is a combination of data scientists who venture into the unknown and others who enjoy the fruits of democratized AI.