e& enterprise, from e& (formerly known as Etisalat), yesterday entered into a three-year partnership with the US-based artificial intelligence platform provider to launch Enterprise AI as a Service (AIaaS) in the UAE, Egypt and Morocco. E& enterprise’s partnership with US-based DataRobot is a way to “democratise AI”, said DataRobot CEO Dan Wright.
“We think with e& enterprise there’s an opportunity to accelerate the adoption of AI in UAE, and to democratise AI,” Wright said.
As a service models have become increasingly popular from software and data to hardware and knowledge. AI as a service looks to offer firms machine learning algorithms without a huge initial investment.
“More data has been created in the last three years compared to the previous 30 years. But most people are actually using their data because they’re totally overwhelmed and have no way of actually processing all this data, but that necessitates the need for AI,” Wright told ITP.net at a signing ceremony in Dubai for the new deal.
Shrinking budgets and a skills gap, combined with the large amount of small and medium enterprises in the three countries, mean that many firms just can’t afford to hire in-house teams to develop AI and ML algorithms.
On the new partnership, Salvador Anglada, CEO of e& enterprise, said: “You don’t need to invest in the platform, you don’t need to invest in the people, you don’t need to have a data scientist, you don’t need experts. We’re going to do it for you. We’ll be able to build the right applications using the power of this platform, and it will be delivered as a service.”
At first, e& enterprise will target four verticals with the new offering: financial services, retail, health, and the government sector.
When asked why now was the time to integrate AI into e& enterprise, Anglada said the market is now ready. The AI software market is projected to hit $62.5bn this year, a 21 percent increase.
“In other parts of the world, like in Europe, the market is more mature. We need to catch up in this part of the world,” he said.
The tech has developed too.
“We’ve moved from experimental AI to applied AI. The difference is when AI actually drives business value. We’ve seen is a maturing of the market and the maturing of the technology,” Wright said.
DataRobot has raised $1.1 billion since it was founded in 2012, and the company is valued at $6.3bn. DataRobot has executed more than 1 million AI projects and delivered over 1 trillion predictions to global customers, including one-third of the Fortune 50, including to information compiled by US-based CNBC news.
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