Infosys this week announced it is making a slew of emerging artificial technologies (AI) available under a single platform dubbed Infosys Nia.
Rather than requiring IT organizations to separately license everything from deep and machine learning algorithms to natural language processing engines, Sudhir Jha, senior vice president and head of product management and strategy for Infosys, says IT organizations can gain access to a suite of AI technologies that they can deploy anywhere.
Jha says Infosys is committed to being flexible in terms of where IT organizations ultimately decide to deploy Nia. Rather than requiring everything to be deployed in a managed cloud service, Jha expects IT organizations, depending on performance requirement and regulatory issues, to deploy Nia technologies on premise or in the cloud, as they see fit.
In contrast, Jha says rival AI platforms are too often made available only as a service because the vendor that developed them is pursuing an agenda that benefits them more than it necessarily does the end customer.
“Today, organizations are being asked to stitch together using multiple platforms requiring multiple licenses,” says Jha.
Beyond the core AI technologies that Infosys has developed, the Nia platform also spans robotic process automation software optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities and infrastructure management services.
Jha says all these technologies are on the cusp of being democratized because the cost of computing and storing of massive amounts of data has fallen sharply over the last few years. The challenge and opportunity facing IT organizations now is how to invoke enabling AI technologies to create innovative business processes before anybody else.