What Is MLOps and Why Is It Important?

With the maturing of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), organizations have begun to understand the plethora of opportunities and challenges it offers. The opportunities could be in the form of upselling, deriving insights into user behavior, better decision-making, value extraction, saving time, optimizing processes, increasing operational efficiencies, and others. In the same vein, the challenges could be in the form of AI integration, finding the right balance, pricing, data security and storage, data quality, niche skillset, and others. Businesses could be tempted to overuse AI just because it is the latest trend and end up being disappointed by the results. On the contrary, underutilizing it could mean missing out on the latest innovation.

Implementing AI in these processes could garner business outcomes such as augmenting intelligence, creating value at scale, and managing decisions and risks. However, businesses need to assure themselves that the AI models at work are qualitatively superior, unbiased, trustworthy, transparent, and able to meet their vision and mission. And MLOps, or Machine Learning Ops, is the right methodology to prove the AI models are working perfectly. It can oversee the collaboration between operations and data scientists to enhance automation.
 

What Is MLOps All About?

ML engineering is the practice of integrating the development of an ML system (Dev) with ML operations (Ops) to manage the product lifecycle. Notwithstanding the advent of AI very early, it took time to come into its own and become a reality by breaking the surrounding bottlenecks. Deep learning, cloud computing, data exchanges, and low-cost communication, among other technologies, have helped to break down these bottlenecks. ModelOps involves people, practices, processes, and technologies to automate the deployment, management, and monitoring of ML-driven solutions into production.

That it is done in a comprehensive, governable, and scalable manner ensures the generation of measurable business value. Through MLOps services, businesses can achieve collaboration between development and production teams to automate services and initiatives. They help to align models with both business and regulatory requirements. MLOps covers areas such as gathering data, creating models, conducting CI/CD, deployment, orchestration, diagnostics, management, and governance. 
 

Why Is MLOps Important?

AI ML services help businesses achieve a host of outcomes and make them competitive. These include unlocking untapped revenue sources, saving time and cost, streamlining workflows, achieving better decision-making, accelerating time to market, and enhancing customer experience. These allow stakeholders to be more strategic, transparent, agile, and decisive in their approach. An ML framework can let businesses overcome constraints, such as lack of resources, sensitive data, small budgets, and others. Following a similar pattern to DataOps and DevOps, ML engineering can foster better collaboration and integration between development and operations while transforming businesses. The benefits machine learning services can offer businesses are:

Eliminate risks: Cybersecurity threats have become widespread and frequent, which businesses need to manage and eliminate. Machine learning consulting can detect the presence of cybersecurity threats in the organization’s ecosystem. The critical technology can analyze several events and analyze any inherent threats – malware, vulnerabilities, and others. An AI-ML-based system can quickly detect anomalies and threat patterns when analyzed against a baseline behavior. MLOps consulting can identify malware in encrypted traffic by analyzing data elements in network telemetry. Here, instead of decrypting the data elements, ML algorithms can identify malicious patterns and threats therein.

Virtual assistants: Businesses are implementing AI-ML-driven chatbots and virtual assistants to personalize customer service. ML algorithms receive and analyze data to make predictions. Thus, the more the data, the more optimized the predictions will be. It uses natural language processing, or NLP, to guide machines to answer questions and draw conclusions in the absence of any human intervention. It can help businesses streamline their customer service and offer 24 x 7 responses, thereby driving better customer experiences and engagement.

Edge computing: Customer expectations have driven edge computing in view of parameters such as robustness, security, and sustainability. MLOps addresses the demand for having a decentralized approach to making decisions without relying on the organization’s cloud connection. Since edge computing is about running workloads on edge devices, models offering ML assurance facilitate the execution of ML models locally on edge devices.

Customer analytics: MLOps enables the analysis of customer behavior based on the humongous volume of data generated by various customer interfaces or touchpoints. The behavior of customers can point to their specific preferences for products or services, thereby increasing the efficiency of the workflow. Moreover, businesses can gather insights into customers who are likely to convert and spend money on enticing them through ads.

Conclusion

Although the IT or technology sector is more data-driven than others, there is plenty of room for analyzing the data and drawing insights. These could include researching customer behavior selectively rather than following a ‘one-size-fits-all’ linear model. MLOps can predict their preferences and help businesses target them with a multitude of options.