Amid soaring demand for tools to enable the data-driven organisation, a partnership between data specialists Knowledge Integration Dynamics (KID) and global AI cloud leader DataRobot is automating and democratising artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), putting it into the hands of more South African businesses.

Markus Top, who is heading up the partnership at KID, says it is a logical next step for KID, which has supported South African enterprises through their data journey for over 20 years.

“Every business today wants to be data driven and embed AI at scale. However, until fairly recently achieving this has been a costly and time-consuming task,” Top says. “With DataRobot, the manual, time-consuming processes within AI and ML projects are largely automated, allowing businesses to transform and innovate faster.”

DataRobot democratises AI across the entire AI lifecycle, making it easy to embed ML into business processes at scale, with best practice and guardrails in place. For businesses, this means faster time to insight and a competitive edge, for IT and DevOps it means it’s easier to get ML models into production and monitor them, and for data scientists and subject matter experts, it means speed, impact and scalability of solutions.

DataRobot also delivers centralised monitoring, management, governance and alerting with a continuous AI framework with automated retraining, and challenger models for model comparison. DataRobot also allows data scientists to build models using their preferred tools and languages and deploy them to the DataRobot platform.

Andre Balleyguier, vice president, International Data Science, at DataRobot, says: “Since its inception 10 years ago, DataRobot has been a market leader and a category creator in using automation and guardrails across the end-to-end ML workflow, making model development, deployment and management easier, faster and more aligned with enterprise governance standards.”

AI data solutions

“This partnership brings to South Africa a very focused set of AI data solutions,” says Johann van der Walt, director of operations at KID. “DataRobot is one of few platforms dedicated entirely to AI and ML. From a maturity point of view, it is at the front of the pack. And KID focuses purely on the data management lifecycle: over 23 years, we have naturally grown into what the ‘big next’ is for industry. When it was integration, MDM, data quality, governance and predictive analytics, we were there. Now, together with DataRobot, we see the need to democratise data solutions to meet changing business needs, and we have moved to meet this need.”

Van der Walt says South African organisations are seeking improved predictive capabilities, often to support compliance and risk management. “While banks and financial institutions were early adopters, we now see organisations across sectors looking to use AI and ML to achieve efficiencies, market share and a competitive edge, and companies want to move forward faster than competitors,” he says.

Putting data scientists higher up the value chain

Balleyguier says DataRobot not only makes AI development faster and easier, it also allows organisations to address the shortage in data science talent. “The need for experts in AI and ML is stronger than ever, particularly in markets like South Africa. Moreover, data scientists often get stuck in mundane and repetitive coding tasks that result in months of development for a single solution. These tasks could be automated to allow them to spend more time on higher-value activities driving business value,” he says. DataRobot offers a Web-based visual user interface, as well as API access that code-first users can leverage through their preferred IDE or notebook tools.

Janco van Niekerk, data scientist at KID, says AI and ML projects can be tedious work – particularly for highly skilled and qualified data scientists. “These projects can be very time consuming: you may first have to make sure everyone understands what AI and ML are, the business comes with ideas, then you meet in the middle and decide on an approach. Then after that, there is a lot of coding, with months of manual, tedious and repetitive tasks to deliver an ML project. But with DataRobot this all becomes shockingly easy,” he says.

DataRobot enables organisations to deliver a great AI or ML service without having to find more data scientists with master’s degrees and doctorates

Van der Walt notes that the massive data scientist shortage has resulted in headhunting and staff movement, driving costs up. “DataRobot enables organisations to deliver a great AI or ML service without having to find more data scientists with master’s degrees and doctorates.”

Balleyguier adds: “As organisations mature and the backlog of AI projects grows, DataRobot can enable junior data scientists deliver results on common AI projects, which in turn frees up time for senior staff to focus on the most complex business problems. It helps organisations hire more easily and get better value from their investment.”

The KID Group and DataRobot are bronze sponsors at the CDAO Africa Conference on 15 and 16 November at the Sandton Convention Centre. Visit them at their stand.

About the KID Group
The KID Group is a private group of companies providing expert consulting, professional services and technologies in the Southern African region.

With the head office in Johannesburg and satellite offices in Cape Town, Durban and Pretoria, the KID Group employs experts across the range of data management, business intelligence and customer services outsourcing. Our combined 300+ team is diverse, not only in terms of our racial and gender mix but also in terms of the skills and experiences they bring to the projects we undertake.

Deep experience, developed over 20+ years, enable us to offer hundreds of years of combined experience in data management, data science, data engineering, business intelligence and customer services. As a result, we are able to put together the best combination of skills required to staff any data-centric project and provide the necessary management to ensure an effective outcome.

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