While artificial intelligence is still in the early stages of adoption, it's become clear that this is a major shift in technology. This has resulted in increasing pressure on organizations and IT leadership to determine an AI strategy and plan.
While doing so, it's easy to get caught up in the grandiose imagery of AI's eventual power and how this could bring massive paradigm shifts. This is reflective of the equal parts worry and optimism we see in AI/ML. However, this belies the power AI/ML technology holds for organizations today. It's generally accepted that AI will impact operations in most industries, but how will this unfold? This is a challenging question internally as well as atop organizations we meet with today.
Upon discussing strategy with clients and reflecting upon our own, we've identified a common thread in organizations: it's difficult to know where to get started with AI/ML.
This challenge has led us to brainstorm extensively as a company. We leaned on our unique synergy of strategic partnerships with AWS and Siemens/Mendix while involving our dedicated AI/ML team that specializes in model development and tuning. We brought together thought leaders from all sides and began the process of demystifying AI.
We identified a comforting familiarity in this process - AI/ML, like other technology and process improvements of times past, will follow an adoption and maturity model. New competencies are nearly always built in a similar way - crawl, walk and then run.
The tendency toward evaluating grandiose ideas impacts our ability to take the first steps toward competency within our organizations. As a result, many organizations struggle with the first stage - crawling. In this stage, organizations look to take the first foray into AI/ML technologies. It’s important to avoid "boiling the ocean" and overcommitting - we want to identify value-adding opportunities to leverage AI/ML technologies and begin building organizational competency.
This is the goal for our first RAD AI series - how can we identify use cases for AI and ML today? Our goal as a technology partner is to drive value for our clients. To do so, it's important that we help our clients understand emerging technologies and where they can be valuable in their organizations.
Over the next few weeks, we will be releasing the 3-part RAD AI Ignite series to highlight distinct use cases that are relevant to most organizations. These will be released weekly and include real implementations to show the power of combining rapid application development with managed AI/ML offerings to drive meaningful value at your organizations.
These use cases leverage AI/ML services from AWS alongside the Mendix low-code development platform. Both technologies abstract complexity to allow project teams to focus on business problems and reduce time to market. This is the ideal process when beginning your AI journey - failing fast and iterating quickly are critical to long-run success.
We are excited to share this knowledge and highlight tangible use cases where AI and ML can make a difference in your organization today. This is not an exhaustive list; we just aim to spur excitement and thoughts within the readership.
If you have questions on rapid application development, AI or the use cases we highlight here, please reach out. We would love to have a conversation and help you forge the path ahead.
Every journey begins with the first step. We hope to encourage you to take yours.
RAD AI – Ignite | Episode 1: Unlock Your Organizations Knowledge
Your organization sits on a wealth of knowledge and experience. This information is often locked away inside disparate software and file systems which can take significant effort to parse through. How do you unlock this knowledge and provide it to employees at critical points in their workflow?
RAD AI – Ignite | Episode 2: Identify and Address Anomalies
Proactively catching mistakes and potential fraud is critical within organizations. Complex rules engines are costly, time-consuming, and generally require modification as new threats emerge. Instead, what if we could leverage past and future data to better identify anomalies in a dynamic environment?
RAD AI – Ignite | Episode 3: Extract Data
Forms, handwritten notes, and documents are important components in many of today's processes. Digitizing this information is oftentimes inefficient and costly. This leads to informational delays and reduced funding available for investment. How can we leverage AI/ML services to improve form-based processes and the timeliness of our data?
About EPI-USE & RAD AI
Within EPI-USE's RAD practice, we are constantly looking for ways to improve the way software is developed and used. This is a main reason why we've specialized in Mendix and used the platform to deliver over 150 applications for our clients since 2014. Mendix empowers business-oriented developers and provides them with a single platform to deliver full stack applications. This allows for rapid iteration and smaller, more agile development teams. This leads to better project outcomes and increased value for clients.
In keeping with our foundational ethos - identifying better ways to operate and deliver value - we've been hard at work speaking with clients and researching better ways to operate. This has led us to work closely with our AWS and AI/ML specialists within EPI-USE. Together, our services provide compelling value to IT leadership tasked with navigating this rapidly changing market.
Why Mendix and AWS AI/ML Services?
In addition to being market leaders in their respective categories, Mendix and AWS' strategic partnership has expanded the Mendix ecosystem with out-of-the-box connectors to AI/ML services in addition to AWS' more standard services. This simplifies integration of AWS services into low-code applications built using Mendix. AWS' partnership with Mendix shows the value they see in the low-code platform and how it can rapidly deliver value within organizations.
Mendix delivers value through rapid application development - modular design, complex workflow, security models and high-quality user experiences - while easily injecting innovative services, like AI and ML models, that AWS provides. AWS’ AI and ML services allow organizations to harness the value of AI while avoiding much of the complexity that can derail project success.
Together, these technologies simplify and accelerate delivery of valuable IT projects while keeping up with the leading technology trends.