Report: recommendation systems drive AI infrastructure initiatives

Promo What AI initiatives are companies investing in and what’s their underlying infrastructure? According to a new survey, nine in ten companies are experimenting with AI, with Recommendation Systems emerging as the single biggest driver for such initiatives.

The figures come in a report commissioned by WekaIO, “The State of AI and Analytics Infrastructure 2021”, which surveyed hundreds of professionals on their AI and cloud adoption plans.

The most common AI initiatives

Over 86 per cent of companies surveyed have at least one AI initiative, the research showed. Most respondents reported multiple AI initiatives, with companies typically having two to three at any given time.

The top use case for AI initiatives was implementing Recommendation Systems, followed by Scientific Visualization, Image Recognition, and Compliance and Conversational AI. 

The report categorizes common AI initiatives by vertical, and we also see different strategies (build vs. buy), frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch, Caffe and others), and databases by vertical.

CPUs vs. GPUs

Over half of the respondents (52 per cent) mentioned using GPUs in production or pilot programs, yet 38 per cent said that they do not have immediate plans to deploy GPUs.

Adoption of GPUs is especially high in Automotive, where image recognition is used to power autonomous transportation. Indeed, only 14 per cent of Automotive respondents did not have plans to use GPUs.

Other industries where the adoption of GPUs is above 50 per cent include Oil and Gas/Energy, Retail, and Cloud/MSP, where GPU use is mainly for reselling. The report supplies details by vendor and vertical.

Some hard numbers on cloud adoption

Companies also reported that around 40 per cent of their data is in the cloud, with the ultimate goal of getting to 70 per cent of data being in the cloud. The report indicates that the two main challenges for increased adoption are the complexity of mobilizing data and security concerns.

Companies’ use of the cloud was split evenly among compute (29 per cent), storage of data (29 per cent), and for Software as a Service (SaaS) (26 per cent). Although data storage was a key cloud usage model, only 15 per cent of the respondents mentioned using the cloud for backup.

For more information on cloud adoption by vertical, and the different cloud platforms used, click here to download the full report.

Brought to you by WekaIO.