1 Management Summary
The KuppingerCole Market Compass provides an overview of a market segment and the vendors in that segment. It covers the trends that are influencing that market segment, how it is further divided, and the essential capabilities required of solutions. It also provides ratings of how well these solutions meet our expectations.
This Market Compass covers Artificial Intelligence (AI) Service Clouds, solutions that enable AI solutions to be designed, built, implemented, and monitored in a modular format. The cloud infrastructure that is often required to train and run AI/machine learning (ML) models is also provided by vendors of AI Service Clouds. This approach also aims to bring AI to non-technical users, reducing the negative impacts of a machine learning skills gap and enabling diverse teams to work on an AI project. AI Service Clouds enable ML developers, data scientists, business decision makers, subject matter experts (for example a sales team member for work on a sales optimization model, or an oncologist working on a cancer detection model), and citizen developers. As an overall goal, AI Service Clouds aim to bring high quality, repeatable, and transparent AI/ML models to the enterprise with minimal time lost during data preparation and development.
The growth of the AI Service Clouds market will be slightly different than the growth of AI technologies overall. There will be a higher focus on the modularity of AI Service Cloud Platforms to enable easy onboarding of models from other environments, and to apply lifecycle management, explainability, and bias mitigation to models in operation or purchased solutions from other environments. AI Service Clouds will play an important role in democratizing AI for organizations of all sizes, for nearly every use case.
Readers of this Market Compass should consider vendors based on the internal requirements of their organization's use cases, and use this report as a guide to shortlist vendors.
Highlights:
- KuppingerCole predicts a rise in the use of AI Service Clouds by enterprises to access AI capabilities
- A modular approach is key to delivering successful AI Service Clouds
- Specific modules for lifecycle management, explainability, and bias mitigation are important
- Abstracting away complexity for diverse users is a distinguishing feature of AI Service Clouds
- Flexible computing for training and operations add to the value offering of AI Service Clouds
