News

AWS Slips in the Rankings of Gartner's AI Developer Services Report

• By David Ramel
• 03/16/2021

AWS is still among the "Leaders" in the report, but the analysts positioned the cloud giant behind Microsoft on the "Ability to Execute" axis and all three vendors on the "Completeness of Vision" axis of the Magic Quadrant.

The change is worth noting because it underscores the fierce competition raging in this space, and the growing importance of AI in the cloud.

Gartner defines cloud AI developer services (CAIDS) as "cloud-hosted or containerized services/models that allow development teams and business users to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) models via APIs, software development kits (SDKs), or applications without requiring deep data science expertise."

Analysts believe the advent of AI and ML has changed the role of developers in several ways, including introducing the ability to use of AI/ML models to classify information, predict trends, assess risks, automate processes, and more. Developers can use ML models to add functionality or automate formerly manual processes in order to enhance existing applications or create new categories of applications.

Specifically, the Gartner report indicates developers will increasingly incorporate AI/ML models into applications to:

• Build conversational agents
• Extract information from or add metadata to unstructured text or image assets
• Build ML models that suggest next best actions and forecast prospects' propensity to purchase or automate decision making for business workflows

These efforts will focus on three main functional areas: language, vision and automated machine learning (autoML).

"The language services include natural language understanding (NLU), conversational agent frameworks, text analytics, sentiment analysis and other capabilities," the report says. "The vision services include image recognition, video content analysis and optical character recognition (OCR). The autoML services include automated tools that will let developers do data preparation, feature engineering, create models, deploy, monitor and manage models without having to learn data science."

Licensed-for-distribution copies of Magic Quadrant reports are typically provided by vendors who are covered, easily discoverable with a quick web search. Note that Gartner says its view of the market is focused on future transformational capabilities of the technology to serve users, and is not necessarily focused on today's market.