How can startups compete for AI talent? My friend runs a small company less than 100 people. He wants to know how to compete against the Amazons and Googles.

I told him not to compete, because you don’t want to play in that space, Can you still get ahead and deliver value to your customers using AI,

without getting in the game of competing against the big companies for AI talent? Yes, indeed. And in this Article, I’ll show you how.

Here’s an analogy, To make it easier for us to understand this, Let’s say you’re a great chef, and you have some wonderful recipes that you want to try out and deliver the results to your customers.

Unfortunately, you don’t have a great kitchen, One option is to go get a bank loan, Find a builder who can build a great kitchen for you.

This is a big undertaking, and you will have to continuously for money and time to maintain it, Another option is to rent a kitchen and pay only for the time you use it.

Also, you don’t have the maintenance headaches associated with it, Let’s call this Cass or kitchen as a service that’s offered by kitchen rental company.

With gas, you get the basic infrastructure and tools that include the stoves, fridges, and freezer, microwave, ovens, grills, utensils, mixer and a whole lot more,

you can simply use the tools that you want, and just pay for the ones that you use, all for a fraction of the cost of building a kitchen.

If you didn’t need to use the fridge or the oven, you don’t have to pay for it. All you have to bring to the table or your recipes, ingredients, and your cooking knowledge, experience and passion and process to create your masterpieces.

Let’s call these your expertise, Your customers relish your dishes, They don’t care about the kitchen, they see value in the final product, which in turn depends on you and your unique recipes, the ingredients that you use, and your unique way of putting these together.

let’s talk about AI

 My friend offers a health service to his customers, one that uses data to recommend a diet and exercise program. He’s interested in using AI to generate these recommendations.

To use AI, What he brings to the table are the data just like the ingredients, the way of extracting value from that data, just like the recipes, and his domain knowledge, just like the expertise.

But he also needs an environment just like the kitchen where he can apply these three things to create the recommendation for his customers.

The cloud computing platform is his kitchen, and he can rent out what he needs without having to make huge upfront investments. Such an environment is provided by companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft, the cloud providers.

In this cloud environment, there are special tools just for data management, and AI. That includes machine learning that he could use.

These tools have already been built by AI experts. So instead of hiring AI talent to build the tools, he should hire programmers who understand the data and the domain, so they can use the tools rented out from the cloud. To make the recommendations for his customers.

They just have to set the knobs on these tools to the right values, which is called hyper parameter tuning. Similar to how you as a chef would set the baking temperature on an oven for your unique pineapple cake.

Some caste providers even offer recipes, and made to order dishes as another service. If you’re creating a five course meal, maybe you decide to get the appetizer and salad from the provider.

So you can focus on your unique value, which is the main dish and the dessert. Similarly, the cloud providers also offer AI services like automatic language translation, and image recognition. That’s all based on the foundational tools and machine learning.

You can use these ready made services as part of your solution without having to build everything from scratch. Ai experts build some of these tools in the kitchen.

You don’t need to hire them as long as you can rent the tools they build. I told my friend that in addition to programmers, he should hire an architect to put all the parts together for the solution he wants to offer to his customers.