Introduction
I have been asked this question multiple times: My management sent out a directive to all teams to add AI to the product. But I have no idea what that means ?
In this blog I discuss what adding AI actually entails, moving beyond the hype to practical applications and what are some things you might try.
At its core, adding AI to a product means using an AI model, either the more popular large language model (LLM) or a traditional ML model to either
- predict answers
- generate new data - text, image , audio etc
The effect of that is it enable the product to
- do a better job of responding to queries
- automate repetitive tasks
- personalize responses
- extract insights
- Reduce manual labor
It's about making your product smarter, more efficient, and more valuable by giving it capabilities it didn't have before.
Any domain where there is a huge domain of published knowledge (programming, healthcare) or vast quantities of data (e-commerce, financial services, health, manufacturing etc), too large for the human brain to comprehend, AI has a place and will outperform what we currently do.
So how do you go about adding AI ?
1. Requirements
2. Model
The recent explosion of interest in AI is largely due to Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. At its core, the LLM is a text prediction engine. Give it some text and it will give you text that likely to follow.
But beyond text generation, LLMs have been been trained with a lot of published digital data and they retain associations between text. On top of it, they are trained with real world examples of questions and answers. For example, the reason they do such a good job at generating "programming code" is because they are trained with real source code from github repositories.
What model to use ?
The choices are:
- Commercial LLMs like ChatGpt, Claude, Gemini etc
- Open source LLMs like Llama, Mistral, DeepSeek etc
- Traditional ML models
3. Agent
- Accepts requests either from a UI or another service
- Makes requests to the model on behalf of your system
- Makes multiple API calls to systems to fetch data
- May search the internet
- May save state to a database at various times
- In the end, returns a response or start some process to finish a task
4. Data pipeline
A generic AI model can only do so much. Even without additional training, just adding your data to the prompts can yield better results.
The data pipeline is what makes the data in your databases, logs, ticket systems, github, Jira etc available to the models and agents.
- get the data from source
- clean it
- format it
- transform it
- use it in either prompts or to further train the model
5. Monitoring
Now let us seem how these concepts translate into some very simple real-world applications across different industries.
Examples
1. Healthcare: Enhancing Diagnostics and Patient Experience
Adding AI can mean:
Personalized Treatment Pathways: An AI Agent can analyze vast amounts of research papers, clinical trial data, and individual patient responses to suggest the most effective treatment plan tailored to a specific patient's profile.
Example: For a person with high cholesterol, an AI agent can come up with a personalized diet and exercise plan.
2. Finance: Personalized Investing
Adding AI could mean:
Personalized Financial Advice: Here, an AI Agent can serve as a "advisor" to offer highly tailored investment portfolios and financial planning advice.
Example: A banking app's AI agent uses an LLM to understand your financial goals and then uses its "tools" to connect to your accounts, pull real-time market data, and recommend trades on your behalf. It can then use its LLM to explain in simple terms why it made a specific trade or rebalanced your portfolio.
3. E-commerce: Customer Experience
Adding AI could mean:
Personalized shopping: AI models can find the right product at the right price with the right characteristics for user requirement
Example: Instead of me shopping and comparing for hours, AI does it for me and makes a recommendation on the final product to purchase.
In Conclusion
Adding AI to your product to make it better means using the proven power of AI models
- To better answer customer request with insights
- To automate repetitive time consuming task
- To make predictions that were hard earlier
- To gain insights into vast bodies of knowledge
Start small. Focus on one specific business problem you want to solve, and build from there.