AI is dominating most tech and even non-tech conversations nowadays with no signs of it slowing down anytime soon. This was certainly evident based on the presentations at the AI Field Day 4 event. The event provided an opportunity for various software and hardware vendors to present their AI related solutions to a group of delegates. The challenge that vendors often have is articulating a meaningful story without it coming off as though they are just sprinkling a little AI on an existing capability. The industry certainly saw a lot of this at the height of the Big Data, Machine Learning, and Blockchain hype cycles. I was interested in seeing if what was going to be presented was a “true” AI solution or primarily just an AI bolt-on.

The event featured eight (8) companies that walked the delegates through their AI solutions as well as a customer story from Nature Fresh Farms.

• Intel
• VAST Data
• HammerSpace
• Solidigm
• Google Cloud
• Qlik
• VMware
• Kamiwaza AI

Key Takeaways

As a former tech field day delegate and now a marketer, there’s typically a story behind the story that’s as intriguing as the story being told. Usually this comes to the surface by placing the content that is being presented by the company against the backdrop of the proverbial “bigger picture” to evaluate how this plays out in IT environments that are increasingly distributed and routinely include dozens or hundreds of other products. In the case of AI Field Day 4, there were two bigger picture takeaways that stood out for me after watching the various presentations.

AI is more than just GPUs

There are two things that instantly come to mind for most people in the tech space when you mention AI. The first is GPUs and the second is likely the company that dominates the GPU space, NVIDIA. GPUs get a lot of love and attention for good reason given the capabilities they can unlock but there’s so much more to the AI story. That was the first thing that jumped out to me when taking a step back and looking at the diversity of companies that presented at the event. Many of the companies wouldn’t be instantly associated with AI but listening to the presentations made me think about the broader AI ecosystem beyond NVIDIA and GPUs. The reason for this is that AI workloads by and large have different infrastructure demands than most applications running in the datacenter or public cloud. This ranges from increased power usage to storing massive amounts of data for training models to moving that data around as quickly as possible on the datacenter network. This means that there are different considerations organizations will have to make when it comes to compute, networking, storage, and the supporting management systems such as monitoring and observability for AI workloads. In many ways this is the AI gold rush with plenty of opportunity and need for shovels, picks, boots, lodging, and more.

AI is everywhere

AI is everywhere, both literally and figuratively. AI has gone mainstream and is talked about on a daily basis by those not in tech. Seemingly every application is adding an AI capability to assist with some facet of the user’s interaction. In addition to it figuratively being everywhere, AI workloads are being physically deployed everywhere from cars and trains to greenhouses and farms. Every organization is looking at different ways and places in which AI can be used to drive additional value for the business. The desire to leverage AI as a business differentiator is an interesting facet of this part of the story as there will be some companies that look to utilize solutions that are private or built internally as a form of intellectual property.

Conclusion

All in all the event included a wealth of information for those just getting started with AI and those that are experts in the space. By all indications AI will remain at the forefront of the tech space unlike other tech given the extensive and mainstream reach of actual use cases. Most of the other tech that has seemingly faded into the background were solutions looking for a problem or solutions that solved a valuable but niche problem.