Connected Data in the Cloud Increases AI System Performance

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the core of the next wave of IT systems, and it is time to get ready. The past year has seen tremendous growth in the adoption of artificial intelligence systems to help companies improve operational insights and provide enhanced customer service experiences.  If you aren’t leveraging AI to support your business already, you should at least be investigating the possibilities.    Here are some steps you can take to establish a solid data foundation to support high-performance AI

Add More Data Sources

Artificial Intelligence systems run on data.  They have a tremendous ability to analyze information, perform pattern matching, and correlation analysis to provide real-time analytics and natural language response – but AI systems are only as “smart” as the data they are programmed to access.  Most of the AI systems in use today are nowhere near maxed out on compute capabilities – they are limited by their data sources.  If you want to increase the capabilities of your AI systems, the first thing you need to do is grant them access to more diverse data sources.

Connect Your Data

Once you’ve collected data from various sources, you need to connect it into the systems that will analyze and use it. You can use Actian DataConnect to help you do this.  DataConnect enables you to connect all your data sources, whether they are IT applications, deployed infrastructure, remote sensors, IoT devices, or 3^rd party data feeds.  DataConnect can be used to move data into a cloud data warehouse like the Actian Data Platform, or it can be used to connect your AI system to the individual data sources directly.

Stream, Stream, Stream

Two of the highest-value use cases for AI are real-time analytics and natural language interactions (things like chatbots and voice response systems). Both of these use cases require real-time information to be effective, and that comes from streaming data. Traditional analytics systems struggled with streaming data because of the volume and latency involved in processing. Because AI systems run in the cloud, they have the compute capacity to process a nearly infinite amount of streaming data in real-time to help you understand what it means. So, once you get your data sources connected, turn on the streams of data.

Move Historical Data in the Cloud for Real-Time Analytics

Real-time streaming data isn’t the only source that AI systems can leverage.  Historical data is a valuable source for performing trend and correlation analysis and developing projections about future events.  Co-locating your data warehouse in-the-cloud with your AI engine enables both big-data analytics and AI-enabled real-time processing to access cloud-scale compute and storage resources with very little network latency.  Actian provides a modern cloud data warehouse ideal for supporting AI system processing.

Most companies have some sort of data warehouse today where they are storing and archiving transactional data from each of their IT systems.  Migrating your data warehouse to the cloud is a great way to accelerate value from AI systems as on-premises data warehouses introduce compute and network constraints that can significantly limit your AI performance.  If you have some data that you need to keep on-premises, that’s okay. Actian Data Platform can be deployed as a hybrid data warehouse, supporting both your cloud and on-premises needs.

What if You Aren’t Ready for AI Quite Yet?

Maybe your company isn’t quite ready to make the jump to leveraging Artificial Intelligence.  That’s okay—the steps outlined above support Online Transactional Processing (OLTP) integration and traditional analytics as well.  Connecting your data and unlocking the processing power of cloud compute in your data warehouse enables you to access more data for harvesting actionable insights that help your leaders make better decisions.  When you are ready for an AI system in the future, the data foundation will be ready for you to move forward confidently.

To learn more about how Actian can help you improve your AI performance and support the next wave of IT capabilities, visit https://www.actian.com/data-platform/

About Traci Curran

Traci Curran serves as Director of Product Marketing at Actian focused on the Actian Data Platform. With more than 20 years of experience in technology marketing, Traci has previously held senior marketing roles at CloudBolt Software, Racemi (acquired by DXC Corporation), as well as some of the world’s most innovative startups. Traci is passionate about helping customers understand how they can accelerate innovation and gain competitive advantage by leveraging digital transformation and cloud technologies.