Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc.

Cloud-based AI is going to rule the world

7/19/2018 by Charles Wilson

By Charles Wilson

Skynet is going to rule the world! Watch for Terminators!

No, wait. The Cloud, that extremely large computer on the internet that is running 90 percent of Fortune 500 businesses. It’s the Cloud that will rule the world, and it’s providing more types of services to solve business problem each and every day.

One of the best features most cloud providers are providing now is Artificial Intelligence As A Service. This cloud-based service is able to do image recognition, run chat bots that provide customer support, provide customers with alerts when business events happen and lock down your virtual cloud kingdom when an intrusion is detected.

Advancements in AI As A Service have accelerated as the cloud has become more mature. The cloud has allowed more businesses to leverage AI in a way that wasn’t possible just a few short years ago. The business cases are endless for leveraging AI. Here are three.

Business case number one. Imagine your business’s supply chain. As your business grows, more suppliers are added to your company’s supply chain. Also, more products and more costs are incurred. But most of all, more financial risk is taken as you take on new products to sell and distribute to your customer. Your company’s owners, investors and management need to know whether they should take on the financial burden of new vendors and their products. An AI evaluation application could be built in the cloud that takes your company’s vendor, product, inventory and customer data and evaluates the financial risk for each product.

But wait, there’s more. This application could also rate each vendor on their product and delivery of their products. Then you could evaluate your sales team’s ability to sell and deliver those products. AI could then could predict, based on these quality marks, the risk of your company’s finances on taken more new vendors and new inventory. This could help your company raise its delivery of quality products back to your customers and raising the value of your company in the market place.

Business case number two. Your company runs multiple dot-com e-commerce sites which have generated terabits and terabits of data. The data has been used in some situations to forecast user traffic during the holiday season, but it’s never been reliable enough to allow operations to handle the spikes in traffic. A mature DevOps process and AI could take the historical data, analyze it, and create possible scenarios that will allow you to predict traffic demand on your e-commerce infrastructure. This would allow you to better service your customer and bring more value to your company.

Business case number three. You’re a pharmaceutical company and you’re testing a new drug. You need a new way of taking millions of data points from the clinical trials of your new drug and determine if this new drug is really going to be a viable treatment to help save people’s lives. AI can run million or possible billions of tests on the data sets provided from clinicals trials and determine if your companies new drug will help save people’s lives.

These three business cases are very real. AI and the cloud play nicely together with humans like you and me. And there’s nothing to fear; Skynet, aka “The Cloud,” is not going to send a bunch of Terminators to wipe us all out.

Instead, you can use cloud-based AI As A Service to provide a huge amount of value to your business and your customers. At LRS, we are constantly leveraging this capability to help our customers bring value to their business and their customers.

Just take a look at our brief video about our cloud offerings.


About the author

Charles Wilson is our Cloud Solutions Advisor. He has extensive experience in designing and implementing cloud solutions for companies in such industries as financial services, real estate, manufacturing, and retail. He holds certifications as an IBM Certified Enterprise Architect, AWS Technical Professional, and AWS TCO and Cloud Economics.