Edge Executive Interview – Vivek Bansal, Dori.AI

VB: If you look at the current trend, high-compute low-cost hardware has enabled enterprises to look to edge-based solutions to process volumes of data that was once only feasible on the cloud. More and more image and video processing is shifting towards the edge to address real-time latency needs, privacy/data security concerns, and bandwidth limitations. However, most firms lack the experience and/or resources in data science and machine learning to integrate computer vision into their operations in a scalable, repeatable manner. We at Dori AI realized that in order to service this market, enterprises needed a full-stack solution that enables AI processing on the edge while maintaining a hybrid approach to synchronize metadata and analytics on the cloud. Thus we set out to build a complete end-to-end no-code SaaS platform that enables rapid build and deployment of computer vision applications on the edge.

What is it you & your company are uniquely bringing to the edge market?

VB: We are one of the few no-code horizontal platforms that enables computer vision applications to be rapidly built and deployed. We focus on across a range of industries and use cases including manufacturing (visual quality inspection, worker/line productivity, SOP analysis, equipment monitoring), retail (automated checkout, staff SOP analysis, customer monitoring/footfall), and multi-site operations (productivity, compliance, security/safety).

Tell us more about the company, what’s your advantages compared to others on the market, who is involved, and what are your major milestones so far?

VB: We primarily target medium to large enterprises that are in the process of digital transformation of their operations. Our technology addresses many of the inefficiencies and manual processes that result in productivity, compliance, quality, or safety issues. Most companies take a vertical AI approach to address specific needs of their customers, but we found that by taking a horizontal approach and architecting a common development platform for computer vision applications, we can rapidly scale applications within an organization with additional use cases and also quickly configure similar use cases across customers.

We have been able to use our AI computer vision platform to build and deploy a range of applications in the manufacturing and automotive sectors, and are currently partnered with one the world”s largest telecom providers to deploy applications in the retail, banking, and surveillance sectors.

How do you see the edge market developing over the next few years?

VB: Low-cost, high-performance compute infrastructure is going to be the key to be able to scale these technologies. Image/video processing is very compute-intensive and as AI technologies get rolled out to 1000s and millions of nodes, that amount of data traffic and processing required will consume massive amounts of horsepower. The shift from cloud-based computing to edge-based processing will become a necessity to avoid large amounts of data taking up critical resources and bandwidth. This push will require hardware vendors to continue to innovate and provide low-cost solutions for both edge and cloud.

What are the main trends you see about integrating edge computing into different verticals?

CM: The limitation over the next few years is the sheer availability and choice of technologies that could be adopted. Automation is going to be a major driving force for many enterprises to help remove many inefficiencies but also augment the way humans operate. Many enterprises will be looking at emerging technologies like Dori AI to improve their workflows and products but also find new approaches as to how work gets done. Our technology has been designed and architected to be adaptive and scalable as the market grows. As we start to see how these edge technologies get used and which use cases drive the most value, we will start to invest more internally into serving those types of business applications and ensure we stay ahead of the curve to provide platform solutions that can easily scale with each enterprise’s transformations.

Second, we will start to see a massive shift of design houses and consulting firms to start to work with companies like Dori AI to augment their offerings to existing and new customers. Technology stacks like the one we have built take years of development and resources that these enterprises do not have in-house. Their priority is to serve as many customers as possible and by partnering with companies like us, that enables them to provide services that can quickly integrate with their existing solutions.