What is Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS)?

Software as a Service, or SaaS, is a concept that is familiar to many. Long-time Photoshop users will recall when Adobe stopped selling its product and instead shifted to a subscriber model. Netflix and Disney are essentially Movies as a Service, particularly at a time when ownership of physical media is losing ground to media streaming. Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS) has been growing in market adoption in recent years, but the uninitiated might be asking: what exactly is it? In a nutshell, AIaaS is what happens when a company develops and licenses use of an AI to another company, most often to solve a very specific problem.