, We will explore the steps involved in building an AI system and provide some best practices and tips to ensure success.
1: Define the problem and determine the scope of the AI system
The first step in building an AI system is to clearly define the problem you are trying to solve. What is the business need or customer demand that you are trying to meet? What are the specific goals of the AI system and what outcomes are you hoping to achieve? Understanding the problem and the desired outcomes will help you determine the scope of the AI system and ensure that you are building the right solution for the right need.
Before developing a product or feature, it’s essential to focus on the user’s pain point and figure out the value proposition (value-prop) that users can get from your product. A value proposition has to do with the value you promise to deliver to your customers should they choose to purchase your product.
By identifying the problem-solving idea, you can create a more helpful product and offer more benefits to users. After you’ve developed the first draft of the product or the minimal viable product (MVP), check for problems to eliminate them quickly.
2: Collect and label data
One of the key components of building an AI system is having access to a large and diverse dataset. This dataset is used to train the AI model and provide it with the knowledge it needs to make decisions and predictions. The quality and diversity of the data is critical to the success of the AI system, and it is important to spend time and resources collecting and cleaning the data.
Now, when you’ve framed the problem, you need to pick the right data sources. It’s more critical to get high-quality data than to spend time on improving the AI model itself. Data falls under two categories:
- Structured Data
Structured data is clearly defined information that includes patterns and easily searchable parameters. For example, names, addresses, birth dates, and phone numbers.
- Unstructured Data
Unstructured data doesn’t have patterns, consistency, or uniformity. It includes audio, images, infographics, and emails.
Next, you need to clean the data, process it, and store the cleaned data before you can use it to train the AI model. Data cleaning or cleansing is about fixing errors and omissions to improve data quality.
3: Create Algorithms
When telling the computer what to do, you also need to choose how it will do it. That’s where computer algorithms step in. Algorithms are mathematical instructions. It’s necessary to create prediction or classification machine learning algorithms so the AI model can learn from the dataset.
4: Train the AI model
Moving forward with how to create an AI, you need to train the algorithm using the collected data. It would be best to optimize the algorithm to achieve an AI model with high accuracy during the training process. However, you may need additional data to improve the accuracy of your model.
Model accuracy is the critical step to take. Therefore, you need to establish model accuracy by setting a minimum acceptable threshold. For example, a social networking company working on deleting fake accounts can set a “fraud score” between zero and one to each account. After some research, the team can decide to send all the accounts with a score above 0.9 to the fraud team.
5: Chose The Right Platform and Technology
There are many AI technologies to choose from, including machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics, to name a few. Each technology has its own strengths and weaknesses and is best suited to solving specific types of problems. It is important to choose the right technology for the problem at hand and to have a deep understanding of how it works and what it can do.
Apart from the data required to train your AI model, you need to pick the right platform for your needs. You can go for an in-house or cloud framework. What’s the main difference between these frameworks? The cloud makes it easy for enterprises to experiment and grow as projects go into production and demand increases by allowing faster training and deployment of ML models.
- In-house Frameworks
For example, you can choose Scikit, Tensorflow, and Pytorch. These are the most popular ones for developing models internally.
- Cloud Frameworks
With an ML-as-a-Service platform or ML in the cloud, you can train and deploy your models faster. You can use IDEs, Jupyter Notebooks, and other graphical user interfaces to build and deploy your models.
6: Choose a Programming Language
There is more than one programming language , including the classic C++, Java, Python, and R. The latter two coding languages are more popular because they offer a robust set of tools such as extensive ML libraries. Make the right choice by considering your goals and needs. For example:
- Python is a good choice for beginners as it has the simplest syntax that a non-programmer can easily learn.
- C++ boasts a high level of performance and efficiency, making it ideal for AI in games.
- Java is easy to debug, user-friendly, and can be used on most platforms. In addition, it works well with search engine algorithms and for large-scale projects. As a rule, Java is used to build desktop applications.
- R is developed for predictive analysis and statistics. Thus, it’s primarily used in data science.
7: Test, Monitor and maintain the AI system
Once the AI model has been trained, the next step is to test it to see how well it performs. This involves evaluating the model on a test dataset that is different from the training data and measuring its accuracy, precision, and recall. The results of the testing will help you determine if the model is ready for deployment or if additional training and fine-tuning is required.
Finally, after you’ve developed a sustainable and self-sufficient solution, it’s time to deploy it. By monitoring your models after deployment, you can ensure it’ll keep performing well. Don’t forget to monitor the operation constantly.