How Domain-Specific AI Creates Business Breakthroughs
Increasingly managers are under pressure to resolve challenges with AI. They need to use their data to drive key decisions, manage risks, and achieve a competitive advantage. Their data changes frequently, making speed a critical component.
Complicating matters, managers have too much data and are unable to determine value from noise, making a wide-scale AI deployment difficult. They need to scale across the organization to affect the type of success they need.
Domain-specific AI is ideal for resolving situations like these.
Domain-specific AI helps businesses process and analyze data within a specific industry and function. Domain-specific AI is configurable to a client use case.
With domain-specific design, AI can be configured and deployed quickly for client use cases. Industry analysts have validated domain-specific AI as a disruptor in the industry. In comparison, generic AI models don’t cut it – especially not to resolve the challenges many companies face in their industries and job functions.
You need human experience to use AI successfully in domain-specific situations.
Consider a general-purpose image recognition algorithm that can identify persons, animals, and objects. Compare that with a high-speed industrial AI application that detects defective packaging on an assembly line. While both are complex AI algorithms, the latter is a domain-specific model for the manufacturing industry.
Here is another example. A general application of an AI content generator can write a college essay or a poem. Compare that with a model that writes toxicology reports for chemical safety analysis. The latter example is a domain-specific AI that is trained on data from the oil and gas industry and serves the energy industry.
The Benefits of Domain-Specific AI
Businesses benefit from domain-specific AI in several ways, including more reliable outcomes, time to impact, pre-trained data from multiple industry parties, and scaling across the enterprise with more use cases.
Here are some benefits of domain-specific AI that Evalueserve has experienced:
1 Spreadsmart works at a 99% accuracy rate, much higher than traditional, manual methods.
2 Our automation platform deploys customer analytics models in weeks vs. what normally takes months to build from scratch.
3 While a single client may not have enough data, we do because we work with multiple clients in a single industry or function. This allows us to build AI models trained on multiple client data sets.
4 Without constraints on the availability of training data, we build domain-specific AI that works well.
Using general AI to resolve specific challenges can be cost prohibitive. Whether the challenge impacts strategic decisions, deals with frequent changes, there is not enough training data to build their own AI, or there is a need to scale, domain-specific AI Is the most reliable, impactful, cost-effective, and fastest means of achieving results.
How Domain-Specific AI Works
Domain-specific AI designs algorithms and models to resolve specific challenges for a particular industry, function, and use case. Domain-specific algorithms:
- Generate more reliable outcomes
- Speed up time to value
- Use pre-trained data from industry sources
Before the rise of domain-specific AI, companies often vacillated from general models to bespoke models, both of which require a lot of effort. Market needs and experiences created a demand for domain-specific AI. Domain-specific AI allows companies to scale and achieve results faster and with a lower data requirement entry point than general and highly customized “bespoke” AI models.
Domain-specific AI offers a happy medium where we develop an algorithm that is specifically tuned for a use case, but it’s trained with data from the entire domain. This provides distinctive speed and cost advantages over bespoke models because they have limited access to industry and functional data sets.
Building and Implementing a Domain-Specific AI Solution
Using an algorithm already trained on industry- and function-specific data quickens time to value. Domain-specific AI delivers better accuracy and relevance because it is built with a purpose in mind. Here are some examples of domain-specific AI use cases:
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Customer segmentation for B2B industrials, logistics, tech
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Customer lifetime value for B2B industrials, logistics, tech
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Upsell/cross-sell recommendations for B2B industrials, logistics, tech
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Table detection for financial statements, ESG disclosures, research reports
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Document classification for financial statements, scientific literature
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Article classification for automotive, life sciences
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Phrase cloud for automotive, life sciences
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Article sentiment for supplier risk, chemical safety
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Named entity recognition (NER) for automotive, life sciences, chemicals
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Parameter extraction from free text for financial services, ESG
Five-Step Macrolevel Process
On a high level, Evalueserve goes through a five-step business process. Of course, the review of the implementation of an AI solution is much more extensive than the below process, but this does offer a simplified macrolevel process to identify and implement a use case.
1 Identify a High ROI Use Case
Domain-specific AI is use-case specific. Deep experiences in the financial sector, manufacturing, consumer-packaged goods, energy, technology, and professional services provides Evalueserve a deep understanding of the full spectrum of potential domain-specific AI use cases.
Being able to recognize can develop the correct use case is essential to building an AI solution capable of returning high value requires time, resources, and experience. Domain expertise helps identify how AI can best match and serve the company and its use case to achieve desired outcomes.
2 Identifying AI Models
The next step in the process focuses on selecting the correct foundational technologies. Usually, the correct foundational technologies are large AI algorithms as the basis for an AI model, for example, the popular GPT-3.5 generative AI algorithm or the SIFT computer vision algorithm. Large models are trained on terabytes of data, but the data inputs are static and cannot be controlled by the user. Large models require further fine-tuning to answer prompts in a dependable and actionable manner for clients.
In a domain-specific model, the data science team selects the correct algorithms. Then, based on the use case, they take the extra step of specifying the data inputs that will improve model accuracy over time.
3 Train AI with Domain-Specific Data
AI becomes domain-specific when the data science team begins training the AI model with industry-specific training data. Data sources include industry- and function-related documents, terminology/vocabulary, data sets, and other relevant sources. Data is labeled to ensure accuracy to meet the use case within the domain.
Training the AI model to become domain-specific requires subject matter experts to spend significant time supervising the learning. The model must meet use case needs and be domain-sensitive, effectively resolving industry-specific nuances. The efforts invested by subject matter experts help the relatively limited industry data set train the model to achieve domain-specific outcomes.
4 Deploy and Integrate
Moving from training a domain-specific solution to implementation allows you to create an AI product-led solution that delivers results. Creating and training a model is one thing, but the solution needs to be exposed to end users. Deployment can occur through platforms, microservices, and APIs embedded inside business intelligence tools like CRMs or Slack or via other core knowledge management technologies.
5 Fine-Tune for Client
User refinement ensures that a domain-specific effort is a purpose-built solution for the specific company. Once end users have the output, end users further validate and refine results, fine-tuning the model further with real-world experience.
Often this is called human-in-the-loop, but the accurate industry term is reinforcement learning from human preference or (RLHF). The RHLF stage is when the AI model achieves the accuracy level necessary to provide the outcomes a business needs. This effectively completes the training cycle.
A Simulation Software Company’s Domain-Specific Experience
A software simulation company wanted to modernize and streamline its go-to-market research and analytics to better support its strategy. The software company takes insights from a variety of data sources, from internal customer data to competitive intel, to drive its go-to-market strategy.
To achieve these outcomes, Evalueserve recommended implementing its MagnifAI solution. MagnifAI unifies actions like customer segmentation, a simple audience builder, customer lifetime value, and an up-sell recommendation engine on a single platform. MagnifAI is a domain-specific product trained to operationalize and scale customer analytics for an industry’s most common customer use cases across teams.
In its totality, the domain-specific solution brought more efficiency and programmatic flair to the software company’s business decision-making efforts. It saved users great amounts of time with its drag-and-drop capability, preventing the recreation of models every time a new data source was added. Analytics reports are self-provisioned and produced in real time based on a user’s specific needs.
MagnifAI made analytics more accessible to the customer and provided richer, deeper analysis – as well as more types of insights. Most importantly, from a management perspective, MagnifAI provided direct access to the company’s performance against its three growth vectors. MagnifAI is informing the company’s market strategy, driving more users, and creating deeper, wider computations for its software products.
Conclusion
Domain-specific AI resolves challenges faster, more reliably, and with less overhead. Business leaders who use domain-specific AI generate stronger outcomes from data, streamline processes, and create more ROI for their enterprise.