The age of AI is here, and organizations must prepare for this new reality.

The age of AI is here, and organizations must prepare for this new reality.

IT departments leveraged fixed costs and skilled in-house resources in the past to provide critical services to their organizations. Managing an enterprise database, such as SQL Server, was no small feat. Machine resources were scarce—memory, CPU, disk space, and network speeds were all tightly constrained. To optimize performance, data was normalized, reducing redundancy and improving efficiency, ensuring that poorly written queries wouldn’t grind production systems to a halt. This architecture, combined with dedicated data warehouses, enabled businesses to make data-driven decisions with the support of internal IT engineers, server experts, and database administrators who tuned and managed the environment.

Fast forward to today, and most of these legacy resources have been replaced by public cloud services, where automation and scalability are at the forefront. Cloud platforms can self-tune and optimize, provisioning additional resources like GPUs or spawning new instances at the click of a button. This shift from a fixed-cost model to a variable one has presented both opportunities and challenges. Organizations now face the difficulty of forecasting IT costs in this new paradigm—what was once predictable, with fixed server costs and in-house expertise, is now subject to the fluctuating nature of on-demand cloud services.

The complexity of this shift becomes even more apparent when we consider the increasing adoption of large language models (LLMs) like LLaMA 3.1. Running these sophisticated models in-house would require substantial infrastructure: dedicated GPUs, vast amounts of memory and CPU, high-speed networking, and cooling systems to keep data centers operational. On top of that, organizations need skilled personnel who understand how to maintain and optimize these environments. For many companies, the cost and complexity of running these models internally is simply too high to maintain or support effectively.

As organizations seek to leverage AI as a competitive tool, they face a crucial decision: should they continue to run models in the public cloud, accepting the risk of high, unpredictable costs? Or should they reinvest in in-house talent and infrastructure to bring AI and machine learning back into their own data centers?

Many are discovering that the best compromise may lie in the private cloud. A third-party private cloud vendor can provide the specialized skills and infrastructure needed to support AI initiatives while allowing internal teams to focus on the domain knowledge that drives business models. This blend of external expertise and internal insight ensures that AI is used effectively to drive data-driven decisions without the runaway costs that public cloud models can incur.

?In some ways, we’re seeing a return to the data center in the age of AI, albeit with a modern twist. Organizations will need to shift their mindset—from viewing data as just something housed in databases, to recognizing that everything, from contracts to HR manuals to CAD drawings, can be considered data. AI will fundamentally change how businesses operate, just as SQL once transformed how organizations normalized and accessed their data.

In the near future, enterprises won’t just ask for reports or dashboards. They’ll be prompting systems with natural language queries like, “Show me all payables over 90 days, alongside customer complaints and recent safety incidents.” IT infrastructure, which used to revolve around structured databases, will need to evolve to support the convergence of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, all accessible through prompts that deliver actionable insights in real-time.

The age of AI is here, and organizations must prepare for this new reality. Those who successfully navigate this transformation—whether through public cloud, private cloud, or a hybrid approach—will find themselves at the forefront of data-driven decision-making in an increasingly complex and competitive business landscape.

James Allen Regenor, PhD, Col USAF(ret)

VeriTX CEO | White House, NSC | National Security SME | TV Commentator | Data Assurance SME | Technologist | Top Secret May 24

1 个月

Back to the future! Variability is the kiss of death for SMBs. Predictable costs are needed to scale! This article is very insightful. Well done!!

YES! It doesn’t have to be scary! Our AI takes in large amounts of data, analyzes thousands of variables across tens-of-thousands of potential outputs, and selects the best schedule that meets organizational requirements in MINUTES!

Very insighful!

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