We organize the knowledge in the form of boards. You can create boards based on a multitude of topics e.g. Sales FAQs and share the same with your teams.
According to a McKinsey Analysis “The average professional spends 28% of the workday reading and answering email. For the average full-time worker in America, that amounts to a staggering 2.6 hours spent and 120 messages received per day.”
One of the reasons why it takes so much time is fishing out the correct information to send and this is where we step in. We want to make it as easy as texting your friends and have thus introduced a G-suite add-on for the same.
Come on in to change your mailing experience forever with your friend Zuzu AI.
As we progress into the modern structure of businesses, we unveil several new difficulties and their solutions. The situation is critical as it is very important to know when to change tactics to benefit the most out of the work. Speculations draw attention towards newer methods of work, more technical and more efficient. Now the question is — Are you ready to welcome the changes with open arms?
Adapt or Perish
H. G. Wells said it best in this quote, “Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.” You must change. You must adapt to this new world. Change is happening so fast that those who hold back, even a little, will be left behind. Now more than ever you must be innovative and creative to survive.
Quote by H. G. Wells
With every passing day businesses are shifting to newer work models. Technological advancements have paved the way for a better working environment which is free from the shackles of confined spaces. With the current global situation, only the company that is making the best use of technology to get the work done will survive.
The future of work is being shaped by two powerful forces: The growing adoption of artificial intelligence in the workplace, and the ability to think out of the box during a crisis.
Techniques used by companies to adapt to the changing scenario
Remote work is changing how the global workspace operates. In a trend that is showing no signs of slowing down, remote work is rapidly on the increase all around the world.
More and more employees are working in remote positions, either full-time or some days of the week, with a large percentage of the workforce looking towards finding job opportunities with flexible schedules.
Companies are determined to make most of the work done keeping the safety of their employees in mind. This being said, let’s take a look at the benefits of working from home.
Work from home gives new opportunities for the employees to explore
Benefits of Remote Work:
Increased Productivity: Companies have seen a good productivity level from their remote employees. Its human nature to work best when they feel free and relaxed. Rather than a busy office environment, a much-relaxed environment helps them focus more and more on the task at hand and provide efficient solutions to the problem.
Make better use of technology: Work from home scenario allows exploring the digital benefits too. With digitization as a buzz word in the world, it’s always better to use technology to make the most profit necessary.
Lower costs: It’s not a secret to anyone that office spaces are expensive and the company spends a lot of money to provide for the comfort of their employees in the offices. Now if the employees work from home these costs can be reduced to a bare minimum.
Promotes a good work-life balance for the employees: A happy employee can be more productive than an unhappy one. Remote work allows the employee to work in a way how they want to work. They get the work done by their own methods in which they are comfortable.
The Big Change — Introduction of AI and other automation technologies
Companies are shifting to a remote work environment but that is not the biggest change that has to come. The introduction of automated machines working in the offices, increasing productivity and not prone to any health crisis, is still considered as a big change that is yet to come in the future. Companies have already started to modernize their systems. They have started incorporating more and more smart AI-controlled systems to assist the people working in their company.
At this moment the companies who are not willing to update do not stand a chance in the global market, they will be left far behind and the companies who use the technologies to the best extent will rule in the game.
Its high time to change the plans as the wheels of fate have turned and nothing is going to be the same in the future. Change is important, change is the key to survival.
The past few years have seen a boom in the messaging apps and collaboration software industry. More and more companies are rolling out new collaboration software every 3 months on average. This has brought several benefits to businesses around the world.
Spending on team chat applications is set to grow substantially this year as demand for collaboration and unified communications software continues to boom, according to a forecast from Synergy Research Group. With work from home serving as a helpful way to work these times, companies are relying more and more on these messaging apps and collaboration software.
Talking about the market values of these softwares a sudden spike is seen in their demand graph which has eventually lead to their growing profits. Their quarterly revenues are at an all-time high and are set to continue growing steadily for the next five years. Third-quarter revenue in 2018 almost topped $11 billion which is quite huge.
Overall, the market for collaboration software is set to grow 9% this year to more than $45 billion globally, buoyed by several high-growth market areas.
Let’s take note of some of the best selling apps in the market and see which kind of softwares are going to rule the market in the coming years.
Chat Apps for Team: Being on top of the market
The biggest growth that can be seen in this market is for spending on team collaboration apps such as Slack and Microsoft Teams; it’s expected to rise 60% compared to last year, with spending expected to reach $500 million during 2019. Other fast-growing market segments include Video as a service (VaaS) and Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS). Both are set to see a 30% growth.
Keeping the current scenario in mind, companies are using more and more of these collaboration apps to get their work done where the employees are working from home. Microsoft Teams and Zoom having a good hold over this industry nowadays as they provide a promising platform for team collaborations.
Slack is now aiming to get a direct stock exchange listing. It has seen a noteworthy growth. According to the company’s most recent adoption figures, Slack now has 8 million+ paid users.
Here’s a list of all the collaboration tools that are used by companies mostly:
The introduction of messaging apps for businesses has revolutionized communication among employees. Apps like WhatsApp have also entered into the business sector with their business-friendly app. But on a large scale, apps like hangouts chat and skype for business have been used by almost all companies.
Here is a list of all the messaging apps that are worth using during work from home:
It is been expected that in the future the scales will shift towards the cloud-based collaboration tools.
Revenues for cloud and hosted software now account for 64% of the total, with on-premises products making up the rest. That marks a clear shift from a year ago when the two were roughly on par. Google and Amazon have brought powerful cloud-based collaboration tools in the market which are being welcomed by companies with open arms.
Get the most out of your collaboration tools
Zuzu AI provides an intelligent knowledge management software that can integrate easily with your collaboration tools and can assist you in keeping a smart track of the important knowledge shared by the team members.
As the scene changes around the globe, newer technologies are gaining more audience at workplaces. It is not just science-fiction now that machines are helping us gain profit and is more efficient than man force. But does this new future of work will prove to be our friend or will AI take our jobs?
Whenever we talk about the future of works, some key points define what kind of working system will define the future of work. At present, there is a system where an employee goes to an office, sits for 8–9 hours and makes him useful by bringing some profit for the company. But this is an age-old tradition that needs to be upgraded.
The important upgrades must be:
A flexible fluid gig needs to be in place:
Generation Z employees are the future of the workforce. These employees are likely to contribute 90% of the future workgroups with some senior members. “Fluid Gig” means positions will be more fluid within an organization. This is especially appealing to generation Z employees as they will be more interested in having multiple roles in one place of employment. This type of economy will continue to expand where professionals sign on as contractors or freelancers and then move on to the next gig.
Introduction of AI and ML to automate redundant jobs:
The introduction of technology in a workplace has made the lives of employees much easier. In future offices, artificial intelligence algorithms and intelligent machines will be co-workers to humans. The human workforce will need to adapt to the change in technological advancements and develop strategies to get the best of the human-computer combination.
Decentralized Workforces or Remote Teams:
Remote teams are a great way to get the most out of your teams. They feel freer and tend to work harder in their favorable environment. In the recent events that have been going on, teams are shifting to this kind of work environment with the employees handling their jobs in a work from home scenario.
With offices shifting towards a future work environment a most common question that comes up in every employee’s mind is:
“Will AI take my job?”
This has been a growing concern for many present employees that if AI and ML automated machines increase more and more, their jobs will be replaced by the machines. But this is not the case. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are for helping us and for taking our jobs. A company can profit only if it is using the right blend of man and machine.
Using technology will open up new job opportunities because those systems will need maintenance too. Human beings are essential as a workforce even if machines are automating tasks. Humans just need to adapt and evolve.
Reasons, why AI will never replace humans, are:
AI isn’t smart enough to do creative works: Our nimbleness to react instantly in very creative ways is unmatched by any computer. A good example of this is the auto-correct feature in smartphones. It uses AI to predict the words but can’t have a complete conversation with your friends. If you use a smartphone you already know that the words predicted are not always correct and can ruin chats easily.
AI can bring out the best in us: An AI system can help us perform at our best. Let’s take the example of sales and marketing. Salespeople waste time qualifying prospects, sending follow-up emails, and updating client relationship management (CRM) software instead of being dedicated to human interaction and rapport-building. Those with a natural knack for selling might be able to keep up, but the rest of your team isn’t going to be as productive as they should be. When you add AI to this job, the job gets easier and your salesforce stronger. AI can handle the redundant tasks of qualifications and CRM and your salespeople can focus only on sales and bring more and more profit to the company because now they have time to study and learn from your high performers.
AI frees us from repetitive boring tasks: With the mundane tasks been taking care of by machines, the employees can focus more on devising better strategies as well as work on other tasks that are more fruitful.
AI creates new industries and jobs: Social media jobs were non-existent 10 years ago. Today, social media managers are earning six figures, on par with the best technology workers. AI is creating more jobs in the IT field rather than destroying them. Today there is a high need for Data Scientists and Developers to develop better AI machines to help the current workforce.
With these things in mind, everyone should understand that AI is a friend, the need of the hour, to improve the current industry and make it more productive.
Where do we fit in?
We at Zuzu AI are trying to provide a system to better your experiences in the business environment. Zuzu AI provides an AI-based solution for a smart Knowledge Management System.
This system provides a centralized knowledge sharing platform aiming to improve the performance of the salesforce. This system is developed keeping the future needs of distributed workforces in mind. The smart AI-based assistance can help in providing faster results whenever an employee is in need of information while dealing with a client.
Find more by heading to our official website: https://zuzu.ai
As coronavirus pandemic spreads across the globe at a rapid rate, it threatens the market of various multi-national companies crippling them to function normally. In these situations, the business across the globe is quickly adopting a more flexible approach — Work From Home.
With the number of COVID-19 cases on the rise all over the world, authorities across the countries have advised all the private-sector companies to follow preventive measures to keep the vast majority of the population safe. They have been advised to promote “social distancing” more and it should be their top priority. Companies have taken the advice seriously and have adopted several methods to prevent any contamination among their employees. Most of the companies are now shifting to a more flexible culture of working from home. Although work from home is not a new concept, it has never been done to such a large extent before.
If you are a corporate employee then there’s a good chance you are sitting at your home with things to do as a remote team member since the offices are closed until further notice. But a good employee working from home is as much productive as good his tools are. First and foremost you definitely need a laptop and a high-speed internet connection. Here I present to you a few tools which are my top picks for such scenarios.
Slack
My personal favorite for team communications and handling remote teams. Slack is among the most popular work collaboration tools around today. Instead of a single overstuffed inbox, conversations in Slack happen in dedicated spaces called channels. Working in channels gives everyone in your team a shared view of progress and purpose. Slack makes it simple to follow conversations or find important information in an easily searchable archive. It is also easy to prioritize conversations in slack. It gives your remote team members a hub where they can gather for both professional and team-building purposes. Slack lets you have individual chats with co-workers, create groups for particular sections or topics within your team and also maintain message history. With Zuzu AI extension Slack can really prove to be the best tool to work from home.
Forget emails, switch to slack
Hangouts
Google Hangouts is most probably the tool that many people ignored earlier. It has seen something of a comeback in recent months. While originally it was developed as an instant messaging application, it can now be used not just for messaging but also for group video calls. Users can effectively switch between participants, quickly turn off and on audio and video for ease of communication, and have largely seamless conversations remotely.
Hangouts Chat makes it easy for teams to be able to get their work done in one place. From direct messages to group conversations, Chat helps teams collaborate easily and efficiently. With dedicated, virtual rooms to house projects over time — plus threaded conversations — Chat makes it simple to track progress and follow up tasks. Chat currently supports 28 languages and each room can support up to 8,000 members. Hangouts Chat is offered to G Suite customers at no additional cost. Upload items from Drive, collaborate on Docs, Sheets, or Slides, join online meetings with Hangouts Meet, or use Google’s powerful search to look up room members, past conversations, and shared files. Drive bot lets you know when files are shared with you, comments are made, or when people request access to your docs. And Meet bot integrates directly with Calendar to schedule meetings for you.
Hangouts now come with GSuite for Google users
Zoom
Zoom is the swiss army knife of video conferencing. Zoom is Ranked #1 in Customer Reviews. Combining HD video with increasingly important features like screen sharing, content sharing, and local recording make it an obvious choice for organizations in need of an end-to-end conferencing solution.
For starters, Zoom makes meetings more accessible. Only one person needs to download it — everyone else can click the meeting link to jump in from their phone, desktop, or tablet.
Zoom can also enhance collaboration during meetings. Whether toggling between participants to share screens or making use of shared touch screens with white-boarding, Zoom offers more ways for participants to exchange ideas than most video platforms on the market.
Zoom Meeting brings remote team members closer
GitHub
GitHub is a development platform inspired by the way you work. From open source to business, you can host and review code, manage projects, and build software alongside 40 million developers. Take collaboration to the next level with security and administrative features built for teams. GitHub brings teams together to work through problems, move ideas forward, and learn from each other along the way. The conversations and code reviews that happen in pull requests help your team share the weight of your work and improve the software you build. You can ask for feedback, comment on each other’s code, and work on projects collaboratively. Plus, with Github’s Slack integration, code reviews and pair programming are even easier.
GitHub Desktop, Simple collaboration from your desktop
As coronavirus aka Covid-19 spreads, companies are forced to restructure their working strategy as they shift towards a digital workspace.
With the growing Covid-19 threat spreading to 109 countries and infecting people at workplaces, the idea of working from home is becoming increasingly likely for a large group of employees. In the last couple of weeks, new positive cases of Covid-19 has emerged in workplaces in some of the busiest cities of the world. Whether it’s Amazon’s offices in the US or Paytm’s office in Bengaluru, the employees are in constant fear of catching the virus from one of their colleagues working in the office. Companies are trying their best to prevent this from happening.
Remote Teams — need of the hour
Most companies are telling their employees to work from home as a precautionary measure. Remote teams have started working for their companies. Even though remote teams are not a new concept. Companies have such work culture for a very long time now. But considering the recent events, remote teams are the safest and the best option available. For remote teams to function efficiently they need a centralized knowledge structure. An efficient knowledge management system that can deliver at the right moment and with certain accuracy whenever required. The knowledge management system should be easy enough to handle and should be efficient in organizing the information shared by team members while sharing the pieces of information in a workgroup.
AI-based Knowledge management system comes to the rescue
Knowledge Management System gives the best support to the remote teams. One of the knowledge management’s key objective is to use company practices and technologies to leverage corporate knowledge. With the advent of enterprise 2.0, handling and structuring knowledge became automated which gave more productivity. As the diversified workspaces emerged, with employees working from home, it becomes extremely important to connect the employees in a collaborative, digitally connected workplace, popularly known as a Virtual Workplace.
How can remote teams benefit from the Knowledge Management System?
In a corporate world, where businesses cannot stop even for a single day to achieve success. The workflow should keep on going even during a time of crisis. Knowledge Management systems can be used to share the knowledge among the team members without having them sit in a confined meeting room in an office.
Sales reps can conduct client meetings over hangouts chat or video calls. These platforms can integrate easily with the Knowledge Management system and provide insights to the sales rep whenever they need at the time of the meeting.
With remote teams, efficient collaboration with the team is important. The team members can use the Knowledge Management platform to share their progress and ask for suggestions if needed.
Integrating AI in Knowledge Management makes it easier for the teammates to work and find answers immediately without anyone else’s help.
The AI system can automatically learn from the data it is fed about the current market and can provide suggestions to the team on how they should proceed further in these situations.
AI-based systems are the future of businesses ( Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)
As teams work remotely, Team Leaders need to establish certain Team Norms:
Team members should be present at office hours in their virtual workspace to assist the company or the client as needed.
The response time for answering any client query should be minimum.
Regular sharing of information must be done on the Knowledge Management platform.
Zuzu AI, a smart knowledge assistant to serve the need of the hour:
We at Zuzu AI work day and night to bring an improved customer experience by delivering information when and where your team needs it.
Keep your customer-facing teams up-to-date, consistent, and confident with trusted knowledge that’s accessible in every application they use.
We provide well-designed Knowledge Boards to organize knowledge for your teams based on the Buyer journey.
With integrations functionality with your favorite platforms like Gmail, Hangouts, Chrome and Slack, we try to incorporate Artificial Intelligence with your workflow so that you can have seamless knowledge assistance whenever needed.
We believe we can make a difference in the business field if we work together. Zuzu’s Virtual Assistant and Knowledge Management System can help manage remote teams with ease providing valuable information as quickly as possible.
Knowledge — the most powerful thing in the universe is very important if you have control over it. It is rightly said, “The one who holds the most knowledge has the most power”.
Look around, you will find yourself surrounded by sources that pour out immense knowledge every day.
Well for starters we can try and store them to educate the minds of people providing them relevant knowledge.
One can say, cave paintings were the first time when humans started preserving knowledge for teaching the upcoming generations.
Since then knowledge management and transformation have evolved considerably.
What is needed?
The need of the hour is to have an efficient knowledge management system.
With the advent of the digital era in the 20th century and the emergence of computed documents, the shape of knowledge management began to change at a much faster rate.
In the 21st century, the combination of scalable cloud technology, faster micro-processing, and big data analytics has finally led us to take AI concepts and build AI solutions that can solve key business challenges.
A fusion of Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Management
Liebowitz describes the concept of knowledge management (KM) bluntly as “creating value from an organisation’s intangible assets”.
But is it enough to describe the problem?
Well of course NO!
The main problem with this concept is to grasp the intangible assets efficiently, address them correctly, turn them to tangible assets and make them available for the organization as a whole.
This led to a need for innovation in the field of knowledge transformation. Artificial Intelligence emerged as a savior for efficient knowledge management.
Artificial Intelligence has become a buzzword. It’s everywhere from information technology to agriculture, the automobile sector and more.
Even though its implementation into the knowledge management system is still in an early stage, yet it has started solving the core problems of the traditional knowledge management system.
Knowledge management takes advantage of AI tools that are used to capture, filter, represent or apply knowledge.
As your company grows, it becomes more difficult to process vast amounts of organizational knowledge and use it to improve decision-making. This is where AI and cognitive computing can help.
Now you must be wondering that what will you gain out of this?
What benefits will you have on using AI?
It is evident that if you are going to invest in an AI-powered knowledge management system you will want to see some clear growth in the efficiency of the business processes.
Facts that matter…
Let us provide you with certain facts which will make it clearer as to how AI has been helping businesses to handle knowledge management.
AI helps knowledge management by handling the core stuffs — automation, data analysis, and enhancing customer/employee engagement.
Automation is the latest key technology that drives industries to succeed.
Automation can help your business save time and energy in a multitude of ways. 37% of large businesses automate at least one business process, while 25% of small business owners have a reporting system using automation.
Automation reduces stress on employees by approximately 38%. Well, no one can deny that a less stressed employee is a more productive employee.
65% of employees are being burdened with boring and repetitive tasks which could be easily automated
81% of workforces are anticipated to reach the breaking point by the end of 2020 if they do not use automation to handle the volume of tasks being generated. This will harm the organization as the organization’s employees are its backbone.
Using AI-based Knowledge Management free up man-hours and reduce operational expenditure.
Highly automated companies are 6x more likely to see revenue growth of 15%+
AI embedded in analytics and other marketing software will free up more than a third of data analysts in marketing organizations by 2022, enabling them to focus their time on business priorities instead of spending time on manual processes like personalization, lead scoring, anomaly detection, marketing performance management, and reporting. (Source: Gartner)
63% of people prefer to message a chatbot vs. talking with a human when communicating with a business. (Source: G2 Crowd)
44% of executives believe artificial intelligence’s most important benefit is providing data that can be used to make decisions. (Source: Chatbots Magazine)
Adding AI to KM provides smarter and more predictive search capabilities that help users locate information more quickly.
If the user can’t find the answer they are looking for, AI can route that user to the right internal knowledge resource.
Another major knowledge management hurdle is that employees in different departments don’t always capture and share information in the same way. AI comes to the rescue here. AI connects data from disparate sources easily and efficiently.
Most importantly using AI automation makes keeping the knowledge base up-to-date easier.
So, where do we fit in?
You must be wondering by now that how can we solve your problems and how we fit in the mentioned scenario.
We, at Zuzu AI, work on the solutions to help you in your Knowledge Management needs.
We plan on providing improved customer experience by delivering information when and where your team needs it.
We do the Knowledge Management in an Intelligent Way.
Keep your customer-facing teams up-to-date, consistent, and confident with trusted knowledge that’s accessible in every application they use by giving us a chance to serve you.
Organize Knowledge for your Team based on Buyer journey
Segment and Divide content in boards based on the team’s unique set up.
We provide Consumable Bit-size Knowledge from your Complex and Long Documents
Learn and Train using data from Different Data Sources such as FAQ URLs, structured documents, product manuals or editorial content in minutes.
Ease of Integration:
Zuzu AI can be easily integrated across various platforms like Google Chrome, Gmail, Slack and Hangouts Chat.
In his famous quote, Lew Platt, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, once said: “If HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive.” This quote is much more important than it seems. It is well known that “Knowledge is Power” and we witness it every day in our work and personal life. We live in a knowledge economy, making knowledge one of the modern company’s most important assets. Given the importance of knowledge to efficiency and productivity, it’s critical that organizations manage their knowledge effectively.
What is Knowledge Management?
According to Gartner, “Knowledge Management (KM) is a business process that formalizes the management and use of an enterprise’s intellectual assets. KM promotes a collaborative and integrative approach to the creation, capture, organization, access, and use of information assets, including the tacit, uncaptured knowledge of people.”
One of the knowledge management’s key objectives is to use company practices and technologies to leverage corporate knowledge. Lew Platt and hundreds of other CEOs all know that if only they could tap the skills and knowledge within their staff, it would be transformative.
Traditional Knowledge Management Systems were focused on passing knowledge down the hierarchy situation when it seemed necessary. However, this system had very little success, therefore it was left for dead.
But the advent of Enterprise 2.0 (2006) has brought about new efficient ways of knowledge management. Modern Organisations have changed the workspace drastically.
The workplace was once confined to a physical office space with employees working face to face and communicate through email during a set hours.
Modern Workplaces are not confined to a single office space. The employees work across multiple locations, hours and devices. As these diversified workspaces emerged, it became extremely important to connect the employees in a team-based and collaborative, digitally connected workplace.
Digital Workspaces open doors for a complete digitized Knowledge Management System. Digital KM methods were so much more efficient than the prevailing traditional methods that it became a must-have for all the organizations that wanted to achieve success. Thus, a new era opened for knowledge management through knowledge-sharing and collaboration movements.
Reasons Why Knowledge Management is important
So, why is knowledge management useful? It is useful because it places a focus on knowledge as an actual asset, rather than as something intangible. In doing so, it enables the firm to better protect and exploit what it knows, and to improve and focus its knowledge development efforts to match its needs.
In a corporate world, all the knowledge which an employee gains in his life by working throughout the years is very valuable. But without a knowledge management system, the employees quit or retire, taking with them what may amount to decades of company knowledge. In these situations, knowledge management is essential to retain the knowledge gained by senior employees that can benefit the freshers. It is estimated that 44 percent of employees are either poor or very poor at transferring knowledge. When knowledge isn’t shared new employees have to waste their time recreating solutions, making mistakes made by the people before them.
A good knowledge Management System helps the firm to learn from its past mistakes and successes.
It promotes innovation as the employees have a good baseline knowledge of the company’s deeds using the knowledge management tools.
Employees can get the required information sooner with fewer headaches.
Make fewer mistakes. The old saying “history repeats itself” is as true in business as it is in all other aspects of life. When employees don’t share valuable information, the newcomers are doomed to repeat the same mistakes others have already made.
When there is a good knowledge management system employees can take quick well-informed decisions based on the past knowledge available.
A good knowledge management system allows all employees to share a common knowledge platform where they can share and access any information related to the company’s procedures and experiences of ex-employees.
It provides a standardized process for all the employees of the company.
It ensures the efficient and effective workflow of the company that eventually leads to the success of the company in the market.
We at Zuzu AI work day and night to bring an improved customer experience by delivering information when and where your team needs it.
Keep your customer-facing teams up-to-date, consistent, and confident with trusted knowledge that’s accessible in every application they use.
We provide well-designed Knowledge Boards to organize knowledge for your teams based on the Buyer journey.
With integrations functionality with your favorite platforms like Gmail, Hangouts, Chrome and Slack, we try to incorporate Artificial Intelligence with your workflow so that you can have seamless knowledge assistance whenever needed.
Serverless, the new big word in the software architecture world has drawn a lot of attention from both rookies and pros in the field. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are heavily invested in serverless computing. Serverless is not just about the hype, it promises the possibility of an ideal business implementation which sounds awesome and more importantly lighter on the budget.
What is serverless architecture?
Serverless architectures (also known as serverless computing or function as a service, FaaS) is a cloud computing execution model that incorporates third-party “Backend as a Service (BaaS) services available by any cloud services providers like AWS, Google, etc.
The cloud providers dynamically manage the allocation and provisioning of servers. It includes codes that are run in managed, ephemeral containers on a Function as a Service (FaaS) platform. By using these concepts, a serverless architecture removes much of the needed always-on server components.
Serverless architectures may benefit from significantly reduced operational cost, complexity, and engineering lead time, at a cost of increased reliance on vendor dependencies and comparatively immature supporting services.
Serverless applications are mostly managed by third-party server allocators and provisioning of servers is done dynamically based on the requirement.
Its main motive is to focus on the application rather than the infrastructure. It sounds very relieving as a lot of working hours on a project go into implementing, maintaining, debugging and monitoring the infrastructure.
With all that now out of the way, the developers can focus on the business goals their application serves.
Serverless architecture is breaking ground in the current business world. It is already accepted and used in production by companies like Netflix, Reuters, AOL, and Telenor. With passing time industry-wide adaptation is constantly increasing.
Serverless architecture for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Machine Learning and Deep Learning are becoming more and more essential for businesses in internal and external use. Artificial Intelligence and ML are steadily making their way into enterprise applications in areas such as customer support, fraud detection, and business intelligence.
Cloud Service Providers have contributed enormously to this growing trend. Serverless architecture changes the rules of the game — instead of thinking about cluster management, scalability, and query processing, you can focus completely on training the model.
With trending technologies like Kubernetes and Docker, one can easily switch from traditional on-premise application to a more scalable and efficient microservices-based application.
Various Deployment Models
Benefits of having Serverless Architecture
Pricing
One of the major advantages of using serverless architecture to train the ML models is the pricing structure. In the traditional approach, the server was kept on even when the ML model is not utilized. But when serverless architecture is used it becomes easy to reduce the cost as the cost model of Serverless is execution-based. You are charged for the number of executions or number of API calls you make to use the ML model on the cloud.
Setting up work environments
Setting up different environments for serverless is as easy as setting up a single environment. Given its pay-per-use, it is a large improvement over the traditional servers. We no longer require to set up dev, staging and production machines.
Scalability
When you push your ML models or AI applications as serverless applications or microservices it becomes very easy to scale up according to requirement. Only a single line of code or select buttons provided by providers can initiate scaling of the application.
Function as a Service (FaaS)
The key-properties of FaaS are Independent, server-side automation and logical functions. It completely manages the servers and facilitates event-driven and instantaneous scaling.
Principles of FaaS:
Complete abstraction of servers away from the developer
Billing based on consumption and executions, not server instance sizes
Services that are event-driven and instantaneously scalable
Ephemeral
FaaS is designed to start up quickly, do the job and shut down. They do not remain active when not required by the application. This helps in saving the execution time. As long as the task is performed the underlying containers are scrapped.
When you want to deploy an ML model on the server it has a lot of drawbacks and complexity as the servers need to be patched, attended to regularly, modified and need hardware maintenance too. Serverless architecture saves you from all this pain so that you can work on the functionality of your application and its uses without worrying about the server maintenance.
Serverless Architecture is a very exciting concept, but when it comes to reality, it cannot be ignored that it too has limitations.
As the validity and success of any architecture depend on the business requirement, similarly the success of any ML model on a serverless architecture can be guaranteed if it is used In proper place.
