Inside the AI-as-a-Service Phenomenon
And a peek into AWS’s latest playbook
In his 2017 shareholder letter, Jeff Bezos hinted at a new wave of AWS value-add products — AI-powered APIs.
“Amazon Lex (what’s inside Alexa), Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition remove the heavy lifting from natural language understanding, speech generation, and image analysis. They can be accessed with simple API calls — no machine learning expertise required. Watch this space. Much more to come.” — Jeff Bezos
In the past, AWS has been prudent in shaping and keeping up with trends, be it hosted DBaaS (database management as a service) or even hosted messaging and application services. And there’s every reason to assume that this new wave of products will prove just as successful.
Even though the concept of AI-as-a-Service is buzzword laden — AI and SaaS are, after all, the driving trends of the day — it’s worth looking past the hype at the underlying factors which could make this trend prove seminal.