By Puneet Gupta, Vice President, and Managing Director at NetApp India/SAARC
AI Appreciation Day (16 July) is here, and we in the tech industry have much to be thankful for.
The technology has progressed tremendously in the last year, with many more promises and growth opportunities on the horizon. NetApp’s recent Cloud Complexity Report, for instance, found that 56% of Asia Pacific tech executives expect half or more of their cloud deployments to be supported by AI-driven applications by 2030.
There are three broad areas where we see AI making a big contribution:
1. Driving intelligence at the edge
The amount of data generated by smart edge devices and a large number of ingestion points can overwhelm compute, storage and networks at the edge. AI can enable
edge-level analytics to process and selectively pass on data during ingest, create different tiers of data service, and speed up data movement.
2. Increasing performance at the core
The network core is the heart of organisations’ AI data pipeline, and it demands high I/O performance. There is room for AI to be deployed to preprocess data and feed the data to the neural networks for model training, removing performance bottlenecks and accelerating AI workloads.
3. Accelerating analysis in the cloud
AI and the cloud are natural bedfellows, with the cloud offering an ideal environment to develop AI workflows, run proofs of concept, and form a foundation to expand on. With the right guidance, more organisations can take advantage of this synergy going forward.
To unleash the full potential of AI, it will be essential for organisations to build a data pipeline or fabric that spans across on-premises, hosted data centre and hyperscaler cloud, with real time visibility and manageability. This will let organisations harness all available information in real time and ultimately, maximise business impact.
The future of AI is dazzling, with many more applications expected to emerge over the next year that we don’t yet envision today. Hold on tight for an exhilarating ride.
