Peak Launches AI Platform-As-A-Service to Improve Retail AI Project Success Rates

By MTS Staff Writer On Nov 30, 2018

PaaS Beta Set to Increase Data Team Productivity by 300%

High growth artificial intelligence (AI) company Peak has launched its AI Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) beta program to improve AI success rates and data scientist productivity across the retail market.

Peak’s AI PaaS beta program sees the company’s AI System opened up to the data science and engineering community for the first time, helping enterprise users to build, train and deploy machine learning solutions across their organisations at scale.

Peak’s AI System is a new category of retail technology product. Its AI PaaS combines the three critical components necessary for enterprise AI deployments:

Infrastructure: data handling, storage, compute, scaling, extensibility, security and robustness.
Workflow: the workflow of taking raw data, interpreting it, joining, transforming, feature extraction, model training, orchestration and deployment.
Solutions: easy-to-build machine learning business solutions.

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A recent PWC report found that just 4% of businesses have successfully implemented AI, which is unsurprising given data scientists spend up to 80%* of their time on unproductive tasks as a consequence of legacy systems. Peak’s new service aims to solve this, boosting success rates by making data teams four times more productive.

Speaking at AWS re:Invent today, Richard Potter, CEO of Peak, explained: “Research shows that AI projects often fail due to the complexity of deployment within retail. Every retailer must become AI-driven, yet no system is dedicated to this in retail today. What’s more, we know 80% of a data team’s time is spent cleaning or collecting data, data manipulation, building training sets or with feature extraction. Peak’s AI system changes that, and with it data teams are able to focus on what they do best.”

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“Legacy business systems are inflexible, slow and expensive to maintain. Data warehouses are not built to deliver machine learning solutions and data tends to exist in silos due to the proliferation of cloud applications. This all makes AI deployment challenging for many businesses.

“Our AI System is delivering powerful results for brands such as ASOS and FootAsylum, in some cases improving revenues from marketing by 28%. We’ve launched our Platform-as-a-Service beta program to enable enterprises with existing data science teams to use the same system. With it they will improve their machine learning capability to extract more value from retail data and experience the real benefits of AI.”

Today’s news marks Peak’s latest product development milestone and the beta platform is now open for any data science or engineering team to use, provide feedback and contribute to over time.