Today’s enterprises face a digital imperative—embed AI and ML into day-to-day decision-making or risk going out of business. The reward for success is staggering; McKinsey & Company estimates that AI/ML will generate $9 to $15 trillion in recurring annual economic benefit within the next few years. The cost of failure is high. Digitally native companies have helped unseat half the Fortune 500 over the past 20 years and the rate of replacement will increase over the next 10.

But companies are finding it difficult to hire the talent required to deliver AI/ML at scale. Skilled data scientists are a rare breed—studies show a global shortage of 250,000 in 2020—and are in high demand by tech giants like Google and Amazon that have deeper pockets and better perks than the average company.

In the face of this shortage, companies are increasingly turning to no-code AI/ML products that enable data and business analysts to deliver AI-enabled solutions. Over the past 18 months, venture investors have poured more than $900 million into no-code AI/ML products aimed at analysts who are data-savvy but lack the training to open up Jupyter Notebooks and build solutions from scratch.

Despite this funding, the tools available today fall short. Products typically force users to download and run software on their local machines, which cannot process the data volumes that AI requires. Most tools don’t deliver end-to-end capabilities, falling short in data integration and preparation or model interpretability and management. And they do not enable users to productize valuable projects by deploying models on production data, managing them at scale, and surfacing insights in custom business applications. In the face of these shortcomings, business and data analysts remain handicapped; at best, they will generate promising prototypes, which must be rebuilt in scalable systems by data scientists—or abandoned altogether.

Because of this, I am particularly excited about the general availability of C3 AI® Ex Machina. C3 AI has reinvented no-code AI with this modern and intuitive product that enables anyone to develop, scale, and apply AI insights without writing code. C3 AI Ex Machina offers comprehensive capabilities for data ingestion and preparation, no-code AI/ML model configuration, and the ability to publish results to existing systems or in lightweight business apps. The end-to-end solution runs in a distributed, cloud-native web interface, allowing users to scale up and down to meet their needs.

Core benefits of C3 AI Ex Machina include:

  • Rapid access and prep for all your data. Access and prepare petabytes of data quickly on a cloud-native, distributed architecture. Scale your workspace with one click as data and use cases grow.
  • AI/ML model configuration without writing code. Easily configure, apply, and manage models in an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. Prebuilt templates, training, documentation, and an active user community make it easy to get up to speed fast.
  • Ability to take action on model results to drive better business outcomes. Take action on your insights by seamlessly publishing predictions to your enterprise systems or configuring custom business applications for use across your company.
  • Seamless scalability at manageable cost. Scale a workspace from 4GB to 1PB+ with a single click in a modern cloud-native web application. Auto start and stop to only pay for what you use.
  • Ability to interoperate with the proven C3 AI Platform. Ensure your work will scale and the value you deliver will last. Collaborate, operate, and scale on the same platform that powers billions of AI predictions for the world’s largest companies.

C3 AI Ex Machina is the simplest way for anyone to begin their AI effort and the most reliable way to scale in-house expertise. Learn more about how to start your AI initiatives at https://c3.ai/products/ex-machina/.