Artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful piece of technology that can help businesses improve efficiency, productivity, and decision-making. Across industries, AI is already being used to:
- Fulfill mundane tasks such as answering customers’ FAQs
- Recommend products based on customers’ historical shopping information
- Improve decision-making by accurately predicting market shifts
Imagine you are an apple supplier. You can use AI’s machine learning (ML) capabilities to train a computer vision model to recognize bruising and other signs of damage on the fruit so you can automate sorting the good apples from the bad. You may even go so far as to use another computer vision model to recognize salvageable apple flesh from the damaged fruits to be used for making apple cider, applesauce, and other products.
Such models would help you reduce manual labor costs and increase your bottom line by maximizing your yield. But although AI and ML have the potential to revolutionize businesses, they can be difficult to implement for businesses that lack the necessary expertise and resources.
A managed IT services provider (MSP) can help address these challenges.
How can an MSP help your business leverage AI?
Apart from having the experience and expertise to help businesses implement AI solutions that meet their specific needs, MSPs can also manage and maintain these solutions to ensure that they are always up and running.
Here are some specific ways an MSP can help you make the most of AI:
- Assess your needs: An MSP can determine your business’s needs and identify the areas where AI can be used to improve productivity, efficiency, and strategic decision-making.
- Select the right AI solutions: An MSP can assess various AI solutions to help you pick the right ones that address your unique needs and requirements.
- Prepare for AI implementation: An MSP can help you automate tasks such as IT provisioning, security monitoring, and software patching. This gives your employees more time to focus on their core tasks.
- Implement the AI solutions: An MSP can help you properly configure AI solutions, making sure that they integrate seamlessly with your existing IT infrastructure. An MSP can also train your employees on how to use AI solutions, so that they can get the most out of these tools.
- Manage and maintain AI infrastructure: An MSP can help ensure that your AI infrastructure is always up and running and that it is providing the benefits that you expect.
There are also specialized MSPs that offer Machine-Learning-as-a-Service (MLaaS) — a way to help an organization’s data scientists, developers, and ML engineers build and deploy robust ML models. These MSPs help clients in the following ways:
- Train ML models that solve their specific business needs
- Deploy ML models iteratively to efficiently produce business value
- Implement data governance and responsible AI principles
- Maintain ML models to counter data drift and other phenomena that compromise output quality
In healthcare, for instance, MLaaS — particularly inference-as-a-service — is helping companies gain access to medical ML models. When a provider has a model with strong performance (i.e., it is proving viable for addressing medical use cases, such as visually identifying diseases based on large datasets of medical images and data), other parties may have that model perform inference on their own data. That is, they’ll share anonymized data with the model and have the model provide detection or prediction results.
With all these benefits, there’s no doubt that an MSP can be a valuable partner to businesses planning to leverage AI, no matter their size or industry.
If you’re considering implementing AI solutions in your business, turn to one of New York’s most trusted MSPs: Online Computers. We have experienced experts who can help you choose, implement, and manage the best AI products and services for your enterprise. Contact us today to find out more.