7 business lessons from AI at the edge

Data-powered enterprises use data, analytics, and AI to fulfill their corporate purpose, achieve their business objectives, and drive innovation. And in today's shaky world, they need to be like water to get there: adaptive by design, hyper-agile, super-responsive. There's a place they find themselves increasingly to build and use these water-like capabilities: At the very outskirts of the business, far from central governance and IT, close to clients, partners, employees, the shop, the factory, the truck. It's out there in the field where up-to-date data needs to be collected in real-time, analyzed on the spot, and turned into split-second actions, without being dependent on a corporate backbone that simply is too slow and too far away. Edge AI – the use of AI in physical devices and all sort of other'things' – is a perfect enabler for these new dynamics: Equipped with sensors and microprocessors, even the tiniest of things can collect data, analyze it with powerful AI algorithms (such as deep learning) and turn it into immediate action. And all of that is done with specialized technology that is typically inexpensive and has a small footprint in terms of power consumption.