Building a Marketplace to Help Businesses Quickly Transform AI Initiatives to Reality (1 of 2)

The Need for an AI Marketplace

Part 2 can be found here.

Businesses are increasingly leveraging AI because of an expanding understanding of its advantages, which include reduced errors and increased automation, productivity, and operational efficiencies.

The lifeblood of any business is data. To deliver the best possible customer experience, businesses depend on building AI products and solutions that cater to specific needs and expectations of their target audience. However, in the corporate world, most businesses lack adequate access to high-quality AI training data that fits into the use case needed to train their AI models. Finding the right AI training data can often be a challenge. There are several open-source datasets available for free and immediate use on the web. However, one or more of these problems can be present in these datasets, i) can be dated, ii) fail to comply with ethical data sourcing, iii) lack the required quality, and iv) are not sourced and made available to address one particular use case in mind. What more? Training data preparation can take a long time, especially if the data needs to be gathered, cleaned, and labeled to train AI models at large-scale. 

This can be a challenge for businesses that look to develop a portfolio of AI initiatives across domains and use cases. The necessary data required to train their AI models might not be available for public access or even if available, it may be restricted by privacy laws. Historically, organizations must work with multiple point-solution vendors and go through different procurement processes because they cannot gather all the data, they need from one vendor in a given time frame. Additionally, gathering and labeling data is costly, particularly if human annotators are required. For businesses with limited resources, this can be a significant financial burden. 

An AI application developer must have access to ready-to-use datasets that are organized, for example, by language, industry vertical, and type of accent. Businesses that want to train and improve their AI models rapidly and stay competitive need to have access to new, and larger datasets. This is because your AI models can be trained in a variety of scenarios to produce results that are as realistic as possible, catering to a larger audience. It is also possible that you train your AI models with large datasets at the beginning, and as you start refining and optimizing, it is possible that smaller, more targeted datasets make your AI models more nimble.

Anytime access to AI training data that is sourced ethically, readily available, and easy to deploy in a format that businesses can quickly add to their existing business systems contributes to considerable time and money savings. Also, businesses that are building AI systems for different target user groups need to make sure that their models are trained on a wide range of data points, scenarios, and user groups of different ages, backgrounds, and locations. Organizations will have an easier time locating this level of information if such datasets are made available on a single platform. Imagine finding such data sets from different vendors that could come in different formats from various locations. Managing AI training data from many vendors for an organization’s unique requirements creates a challenging work environment with a lack of data-tool integration and engagement disarray.

To effectively train AI models, there is this basic yet mandatory requirement for making available high-quality, diversified AI training data. By creating an AI marketplace, this need is met, enabling developers to build AI systems by searching for, and sourcing datasets that are transparent, trustworthy and compliant, all at one place.

It is for this reason AI marketplaces have become an increasingly important platform for AI training needs over the past few years. As a one-stop-shop for AI training data needs, AI marketplaces can be a secure, trustworthy platform for AI developers and data scientists to find the data they need for their projects. AI marketplaces utilize a governed, secure, trust-based platform that allows companies to purchase data without fear of fraud or data misuse. Furthermore, AI marketplaces serve as an efficient platform by meeting the unique requirements of various AI builders.

Providing such a feature or service makes it easier for buyers to use and manage these AI datasets. By providing AI training data that has been subjected to contributor consent, properly labeled, verified, and annotated, and free from sensitive or confidential data, businesses can stay safe from any ethical data sourcing and data privacy issues.

The Challenges of Creating High-Quality Training Data

Making available high-quality training data is one of the most critical aspects of developing successful AI applications. This can be a difficult and time-consuming process, as it requires a deep understanding of the data and the ability to label and annotate the data properly. Also, creating high-quality training data often requires significant resources, such as expensive hardware and software and skilled crowd contributors. To source the AI training data for a particular accent and a particular locale, the vendor should either have certified internal contributors and established processes or be able to gain immediate access to crowd contributors for their niche or large-scale requirements.

Buyers sourcing AI training data from AI marketplaces must also understand the context of the datasets under consideration. Knowing how the data was created enables them to understand dataset relevancy. For example, a buyer looking to train his AI model based on 1000 hours of ready-to-use Korean spontaneous speech data for the Banking industry vertical would want to understand the nature of the dataset, such as the number of hours contributed by the crowd (male, female), their age and their accent. This level of metadata is essential for the buyers of AI training data because they get to know the relevance behind the dataset development that would augment in defining their outcomes.

The Benefits of a One-Stop-Shop for All AI Training Data Needs

AI marketplaces serve as the mediation layer between your brand and AI experts developing best-in-class AI solutions by offering both standardized and customized AI training data. Not only do you obtain what you need to train your AI models, but you also gain knowledge about additional ways to train them to serve multiple audiences. AI marketplaces provide additional security measures, such as encryption, authentication, and access control, to ensure that the data made available is safe and secure.

In the next article, I will discuss the Defined.ai Marketplace.

Thanks to Hem Muralidharan for his contribution to this article.