Networks Europe Jul-Aug 2020 | Page 29

AI and machine learning 29 The interest in adding Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to business models is fast gaining momentum as organisations look to find patterns within their data that can deliver greater business and customer intelligence, and predict future trends. Peter Ruffley CEO Zizo As Gartner highlights, the number of enterprises implementing AI tripled in the past year. However, with Gartner also claiming that more than 30% of data centres that don’t deploy AI and machine learning won’t be operationally and economically feasible by 2020, Peter Ruffley, Chairman at Zizo, discusses how we can best use AI and what its role is within the data centre. The promise of AI At present, the IT industry is doing itself no favours by promising the earth with emerging technologies, without having the ability to fully deliver them, see Hadoop’s story with big data as an example - look where that is now. There is also a growing need to dispel some of the myths surrounding the capabilities of AI and data led applications, which often sit within the c-suite, that investment will give them the equivalent of the ship’s computer from Star Trek, or the answer to the question ‘how can I grow the business?'. As part of any AI strategy, it’s imperative that businesses, from the board down, have a true understanding of the use cases of AI and where the value lies. If there is a clear business need and an outcome in mind then AI can be the right tool. But it won’t do everything for you – the bulk of the work still has to be done somewhere, either in the machine learning or data preparation phase. AI ready vs. AI reality With IoT, many organisations are chasing the mythical concept of ‘let’s have every device under management’. But why? What’s the real benefit of doing that? All they are doing is creating an overwhelming amount of low value data. They are expecting data warehouses to store a massive amount of data. If a business keeps data from a device that shows it pinged every 30 seconds rather than a minute, then that’s just keeping data for the sake of it. There’s no strategy there. The ‘everyone store everything’ mentality needs to change. One of the main barriers to implementing AI are the www.networkseuropemagazine.com