Artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing have been around for a while and are the finest modern-day cognitive technologies, with 94% of the enterprises already using cloud services. Lately, some of the biggest tech giants have thought about the conglomeration of cloud and AI to create unprecedented business opportunities. The cloud AI market revenue was $5.2 billion in 2020 and will reach $13.6 billion by 2026. By 2025, AI will account for 50% of the public cloud revenue. How about leveraging this potential to your business advantage? This article will help you explore how AI and the cloud are bringing digital transformation. 

How Is Cloud Computing Making AI Accessible?

Before going into the details of how cloud and AI can transform your enterprise, it’s essential to understand what value cloud computing brings to AI. One of the significant benefits of using the cloud with AI is that it makes it more accessible. Here’s how cloud computing helps: 

Defines AI and its capabilities: Working with AI becomes tedious if you haven’t defined its scope and resources. Many providers offer pre-packaged AI capabilities regarding cloud services. This helps you reduce guesswork through case studies, limitations, and documentation.

Makes AI smarter: With any public cloud service, you can access open data that belongs to no one and everyone. It means there is no official owner and you can access it without copyright issues. In addition, partnering with a public cloud provider will get petabytes of data for training AI models. The more data processed by AI, the more possibilities for predicting accurate future trends. 

In 2012, Google experimented with deep learning, where they trained a neural network and asked it to recognize cats and human faces. Then, Google used 10 million images from YouTube videos to train the AI model. In 2016, Google finished the experiment and published a report that contained insights into the process. After that, Google released a dataset of millions of tagged photos and videos they used to train AI models. It is a perfect example of open data. 

Lowers cost: Implementation cost is one of the barriers to entry regarding AI adoption. Cloud providers offer serverless architecture where you only need to pay for your usage. So, you can access AI capabilities anytime and don’t need to pay for server uptime. The providers will charge only for the amount of time you’re using AI capabilities, saving you a lot of time and cost. 

These were some of the ways through which cloud computing services make AI more accessible than ever before. However, there will be a question on everyone’s mind like, what kind of business benefits do enterprises get when they use these two technologies together? Let us try to understand that in our upcoming section. 

Business Benefits of Using Cloud and AI Together  

Amplify customer experience: Whether it’s manufacturing, banking, finance, retail, automobile, or e-commerce stores, the cloud AI combination helps uplift your customer experience. For example, cab services can use a cloud AI-powered recommendation engine that suggests personalized offers based on destination preferences, or a movie booking website can use cloud-AI services to provide recommendations through knowledge graphs. 

Shape business strategies: By using AI in cloud services, you can get a lot of insights related to your customer and business performance. Based on this analysis, the CFO can form a strategy for future financial planning of where to invest more and where not. Similarly, the CMO can shape marketing strategies for various products and try to increase the ROI. These deeper-level insights are impossible with raw data, so AI and cloud are effective in a combo.     

Enable hyper-automation: In today’s day and age, enterprises deal with a lot of data and have multiple repetitive tasks. That’s where intelligent automation comes into the picture, and with cloud AI combination, you can enable that to improve business process efficiency. For example, a mobile application for employee management can make an API call to extract information from the resume document and transfer that to HR, which eases the onboarding process.     

Faster decision-making: Enterprises need to make business decisions and do it quickly to run their business effectively. That’s where the cloud-AI combo comes into play, as it converts the raw data into meaningful and insightful information for making the right business decisions. Predictive analytics is one of the biggest USPs of the cloud-AI combo. It allows enterprises to make informed choices, and that’s why the cloud-AI combination seems on the top of the chart.   

Secure ecosystem: Security has always been one of the biggest concerns for enterprises worldwide. Implementation of cloud and AI as a combo would help you process information swiftly and detect security vulnerabilities at the earliest. AI can also prompt caution or warning messages when it finds something suspicious. It will also help the security teams plan their activities and take quick action to remove threats, which would secure your business.    

Operational improvements: As the company grows, the operation becomes complicated. Choose cloud operators like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud to handle these tasks. AI will also help you achieve operational efficiencies as the service will remain available 24/7, and you can access them whenever required. In addition, due to their high computation power, operations will be completed in less time than when conducted in data centers.  

Most of you have eaten Cheetos. But, have you ever noticed any change in taste? It’s down to the partnership between Pepsico and Microsoft, where they developed a solution – Project Bonsai – that uses computer vision to make recommendations anytime there is fallout in the product. Bonsai continually monitors the quality of Cheetos using sensors and has a checklist given as data to AI models to identify the good and bad quality. The AI algorithms continuously learn from the data extracted through Microsoft’s cloud-based solution and make accurate predictions. As a result, PepsiCo brought high quality and consistency to products.         

Wrapping Up    

Cloud and AI have united to become a lethal combination that can unlock new opportunities and possibilities for enterprises to drive innovation and bring business value. Many tech giants have already started adopting this combination and benefits in terms of lower infrastructure cost, higher agility, operational efficiency, saving time with hyper-automation, etc. Why? Dive into the untapped potential of cloud and AI and drive home the advantage for your enterprises by exploring unprecedented opportunities.