Companies that have effectively integrated AI into their operations have overcome significant obstacles, such as skill shortages and data complexity. For those still facing challenges, we’ve made this article to offer practical advice on how to build an AI app for business.
Before diving into AI development, consider these critical questions, discussed in detail further below:
Additionally, we’ll provide guidance on estimating the costs of your AI project and suggest potential AI applications poised for popularity in the near future.
Let’s begin with some key points.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines, enabling them to think and learn like humans.
Therefore, creating an AI application means developing a computer program that can perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence. These tasks include reasoning, learning from experience, understanding human language, recognizing patterns, and making decisions.
To develop AI software, developers employ various technologies:
If you wonder how to build an AI application, Syndicode is an excellent choice for finding specialists to manage your project from start to finish, including post-launch support. We can also provide expert assistance to enhance your core team’s skills with the necessary knowledge.
As an end-to-end custom software development company, we have all the specialists your project might need. Our experts are senior-level professionals in their fields, constantly updating their skills with the latest technologies and best practices.
We’ve delivered various innovative solutions, including a loan origination system with an AI-powered report generation tool, an all-in-one wholesale solution for iPad with image recognition, and a leading job search and HR platform with an ML-powered recommendation system, which we have modernized and continue to maintain.
These are just some examples showcasing our capabilities. If you have a specific project in mind and want to learn more about how we can assist, we invite you to schedule a quick call with us.
Our team includes experts in every facet of AI and ML development necessary for your business, from algorithms and model integration to computer vision and NLP. For more information, visit our service page.
See servicesAI-powered software is definitely an investment, but it pays off quickly. According to Constant Contact, the majority of businesses that have adopted AI and automation saw significant cost reductions and efficiency improvements. And the more they use the technology, the greater the benefits.
Here are some key findings from their report:
Now, if you are wondering how to create an AI app, you must know the specific benefits AI offers to businesses and how it can achieve these improvements.
AI applications can handle repetitive and time-consuming tasks, like data entry, scheduling, and customer service inquiries, freeing up human employees for more complex and strategic work.
AI algorithms can also analyze data and suggest changes to optimize logistics, supply chain management, and energy consumption, reducing costs and improving operational efficiency.
AI enables personalized recommendations and content for users based on their behaviors, preferences, and past interactions.
AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can provide 24/7 customer service, offering quick responses to inquiries and resolving issues. These efforts improve overall customer support and significantly enhance user engagement and satisfaction.
AI can analyze patterns in customer data to predict future buying behaviors and trends, helping businesses tailor their marketing strategies and product development to potentially increase sales.
Moreover, by understanding customer preferences and behaviors, AI can identify opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling, thereby increasing the average value of sales.
AI can analyze market data and consumer trends more efficiently than traditional methods, providing businesses with valuable insights that can inform strategic decisions. It can help innovate by generating ideas and suggesting improvements to products and services.
AI algorithms can monitor and analyze data from various sources in real time to detect fraudulent activities, potential security breaches, and cyber threats, significantly enhancing security measures.
In manufacturing and production, AI systems can inspect and identify defects or quality issues more accurately and consistently than human inspectors, ensuring higher-quality products.
AI development is increasingly capturing attention and investment each year thanks to its broad and impactful applications. Yet, many companies are still exploring how to create an AI-powered app for outstanding growth and performance.
Here are the leading industries making significant strides in AI adoption:
IT companies employ AI to automate routine tasks, enhance cybersecurity, and drive innovation in software development. Google, for instance, integrates AI in various areas, such as predictive typing in Gmail, AI-driven search algorithms, and DeepMind’s AI research to boost data center energy efficiency.
AI enables retailers to enhance shopping experiences through personalized recommendations, streamline inventory management, and enable efficient checkout processes. An industry giant, Amazon uses AI to optimize its customized shopping suggestions and logistics. In addition, Amazon Go stores leverage AI to provide a checkout-free shopping experience.
In finance, AI improves risk assessment and fraud detection and personalizes customer service through chatbots and robo-advisors. PayPal, for example, employs machine learning to analyze transactions in real-time, identifying patterns that indicate fraudulent activity.
AI assists healthcare providers in improving diagnostic accuracy, personalizing treatment plans, and simplifying administrative tasks. IBM’s Watson Health is a great example of how to create an AI app to analyze clinical notes and reports, helping in formulating treatment plans and identifying potential treatment options.
The education sector benefits from AI in personalizing learning experiences, automating administrative tasks, and supporting adaptive learning platforms. Duolingo is a prominent example of a learning platform that successfully uses AI to offer personalized language learning paths that adapt to user progress, strengths, and weaknesses.
Manufacturing companies use AI for predictive maintenance, production planning optimization, and quality control. Siemens employs AI-based software and digital twins to predict equipment failures before they occur, reducing downtime and maintenance costs.
AI optimizes routing, supply chain management, and delivery efficiency in shipping and supply chains. UPS’s ORION system, for example, uses advanced algorithms to find the most efficient delivery routes, saving millions of miles and gallons of fuel annually.
Marketers leverage AI for improved customer segmentation, campaign personalization, and customer behavior prediction. Netflix is at the forefront of AI adoption for marketing, personalizing viewer experiences with recommendations based on their viewing history and preferences.
Let our AI development team guide you in creating a smarter, future-ready business by strategically deploying cutting-edge software. Simply share your needs with us by completing a brief questionnaire.
Contact usDifferent companies may have varying approaches regarding how to create AI software, depending on their resources and available skills. Here’s a general workflow as practiced at Syndicode:
The first step in any software development project is to understand the problem you want to solve with AI and set clear objectives. This initial phase is crucial because it guides the entire project.
Start by identifying the need for an AI solution. Consider questions such as, “What specific problem are we trying to address?” and “How can AI help resolve or improve this issue?” It’s important to set clear, measurable objectives for the AI system.
At Syndicode, we ensure our project goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART).
For effective goal setting and outcome planning, hold meetings with project stakeholders to collect requirements and insights and to align expectations. Conduct a feasibility study to verify that AI can solve the problem and establish success metrics for the project.
We previously shared a comprehensive guide on running discovery sessions to enhance efficiency and gather all necessary information for planning a development project.
Using business analysis services can help align project goals with business objectives and prevent underestimating the project’s complexity and resource needs.
What do you want AI to do?
| Sample request | Task for AI | AI application type |
|---|---|---|
| Estimate sales figures for the next period; Project ROI over the next 5 years | Forecast values within a timeframe | Forecasting |
| Learn why customers abandon carts; See which services attract the most customers | Find out what’s behind outcomes | Impact analysis |
| Group users into target audiences; Categorize products by popularity | Find similarities in unlabeled data | Clustering |
| What’s in this comment’s mood? Will this customer proceed to checkout? | Answer questions about data | Classification |
| Learn what customers often buy in bulk; Figure out the topics whose content is most likely to be shared | Find patterns | Association |
| Monitor readings from sensors for deviations from the norm; Notice and prevent fraudulent activity | Look out for unusual behaviors | Anomaly detection |
AI models learn from data, making the collection of high-quality, relevant data crucial for creating an effective AI app. Here’s the general workflow for data preparation for AI development:
Check out our previous blog post for more insights on data’s role in AI development, including tips on data collection, common data sources, and preparation techniques for AI models.
Where can you find it, and how can you prepare data for AI?
| AI application type | Best data sources | Preparation techniques |
|---|---|---|
| Forecasting | Public data sources (e.g., Eurostat, Google Finance, NASA) | Detrending, normalization, or transformation |
| Impact analysis | Institutional data sources (e.g., WHO, government reports, research institution websites) | Matching data to time frames or conditions, normalization, ensuring causality |
| Clustering | Multimedia data repositories (e.g., UCI Machine Learning Repository, Kaggle, ImageNet) | Scaling, normalization, and identifying and removing irrelevant features |
| Classification | Supervised learning data sources (e.g., Kaggle, Amazon’s AWS datasets, social media APIs) | Bias elimination, handling missing values, encoding categorical variables, augmenting |
| Association | Retail and e-commerce transactional data, public datasets on consumer behavior | Structuring in a specific format |
| Anomaly detection | Network traffic and security datasets (e.g., KDD Cup), industrial and machinery maintenance data repositories | Normalization, handling outliers |
Your project’s nature and size will guide your choice between custom AI development using a framework or opting for a pre-trained, cloud-based AI/ML model available through an API. Let’s quickly go over the differences.
Custom AI application development
This approach is best suited for projects requiring specific model architectures or when you plan to train models from scratch with your own data. In other words, it’s suitable when you fully understand how to develop an AI app and need detailed control over the process, including design, training, data preparation, and evaluation.
To develop a custom AI application, you’ll need a solid grasp of machine learning algorithms, data science, and possibly deep learning.
Cloud-based AI/ML model
This option is great for projects that need to integrate AI features quickly and with minimal setups, such as chatbots, image and speech analysis, and language translation services.
You can select a cloud model from providers like OpenAI, Google Cloud Vision, or IBM Watson and use their API to add artificial intelligence capabilities to your application.
This method allows you to add AI features to applications without understanding the complex model structures or managing the computing power for AI model training and operations. Basic web programming knowledge and the ability to use external APIs are all that’s required.
Pre-trained cloud-based model
Cloud-based AI models come pre-trained with a broad base of data, enabling them to tackle a wide array of tasks right off the bat. However, they need to be customized – or fine-tuned – to tailor them to specific project needs. The two main strategies for this are:
Next, set up a fine-tuning process using your chosen AI framework (like PyTorch or TensorFlow). This involves:
After training, evaluate the model on a separate test set to ensure it performs well on unseen data. Use appropriate metrics suited to your task, such as accuracy for classification tasks or BLEU scores for translation tasks.
At Syndicode, specialists assess the model using a validation dataset after each iteration, aiming to find the perfect balance between underfitting and overfitting.
Custom model
If you want to know how to create a custom AI model from scratch, choose a suitable model architecture for your problem. For example, CNNs are highly effective for tasks involving images, and RNNs are better suited for sequence data, like text and audio. At the same time, transformers excel in handling complex contextual relationships in data.
Construct your model using a deep learning framework (TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras). This includes defining the model layers, activation functions, and an appropriate output layer (e.g., softmax for classifications).
Next, train the model on your dataset. This involves:
If results are unsatisfactory, you may need to return to earlier steps to collect more data, try a different model architecture, or adjust hyperparameters.
Deploying an AI model involves knowing how to integrate AI it into an existing app or developing a new application for it.
Start by ensuring the model can be accessed and used within the chosen software environment. This step might include containerizing the model to enhance its portability and setting up the necessary infrastructure in the chosen setting.
The infrastructure setup could entail developing APIs, creating a microservices architecture, or ensuring the AI model has access to essential resources like computing power and storage.
Additionally, it’s often necessary to adjust networking and security settings within the application.
After deployment, it’s important to implement monitoring to observe the model’s performance and confirm it consistently meets user needs.
AI models may become less effective over time due to changes in data and real-world conditions. Therefore, you need to monitor the model’s performance and data drift, being prepared to retrain the model with updated data or modify it to accommodate shifts in underlying patterns.
Additionally, the rapidly evolving landscape of AI and ML can result in changes to current legal and ethical standards. So, you should stay informed about and comply with data privacy regulations (like GDPR and CCPA), put in efforts to reduce bias and ensure transparency in AI decision-making processes.
To maintain AI-powered software effectively while addressing business needs, many companies outsource their software’s support and maintenance to a trusted IT services provider. At Syndicode, we offer flexible engagement models to provide the optimal balance of quality and cost.
Contact us for a consultation on digital transformation. Simply fill out a brief form to get started.
Write usEveryone who has wondered how to create an AI app has likely encountered the unique issues connected with the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence. Below, we explain some of these challenges.
AI systems need large amounts of high-quality, relevant data to learn and make precise predictions or decisions. Many businesses struggle with accessing enough data or ensuring their data is clean, well-organized, and representative of the scenarios the AI is expected to handle.
To address this challenge, you can use crowdsourcing and consider collaborating with other organizations in your sector to access larger datasets. Expanding datasets artificially is another strategy, as long as it’s done with techniques that maintain data integrity.
Additionally, implementing thorough data preprocessing and cleaning procedures is crucial for ensuring data quality.
AI systems can unintentionally learn and reinforce biases from their training data, leading to unfair or unethical results. This not only damages an organization’s reputation but may also result in legal problems.
To prevent this, it’s crucial to use diverse training data that covers a broad range of scenarios and demographics. Employing tools and methods designed to detect and reduce bias in AI models is also vital.
Moreover, incorporating outsourced specialists into your team is a cost-effective strategy to get more varied backgrounds in your AI project, helping spot potential biases early on.
Integrating AI systems into current business processes and scaling them for larger data volumes or more complex tasks can be challenging. These challenges can be technical, organizational, or related to infrastructure.
To address these issues, it’s important to understand how to make an AI program with modular, flexible architectures that easily fit into existing systems. Using cloud computing services can offer the necessary scalability and robustness.
Additionally, leveraging expert DevOps consulting services can smooth the process of integrating and deploying AI models through the introduction of CI/CD practices.
As regulatory frameworks constantly evolve to address privacy, security, and ethical issues, maintaining compliance can be complex, especially for businesses active in multiple jurisdictions.
A key step towards ensuring ongoing compliance is to develop AI software that is transparent and capable of explaining their decisions. Bringing legal and compliance experts into the AI development process early on can help simplify navigating the regulatory landscape.
Additionally, regular compliance audits are essential to stay updated on regulatory changes impacting AI.
The high demand for skilled AI professionals poses a challenge for businesses needing talent to develop and maintain AI systems. To make your organization more appealing to top talent, it’s crucial to foster an environment that promotes innovation and creativity.
Additionally, offering continuous education and training opportunities for your employees to develop AI skills is important. Meanwhile, outsourcing parts or entire projects to a competent software development partner like Syndicode can ensure access to skilled AI app developers, enabling uninterrupted progress and avoiding delays.
A quick Google search shows that the cost of developing an AI solution can start from $30K to $150K. We have previously published a detailed guide on estimating the cost of custom software development projects. Now, let’s examine the key factors that contribute to the cost of developing an AI solution:
The cost of tools for AI application development encompasses the expenses associated with using AI development frameworks as well as the hardware and software costs for custom development.
For those considering cloud-based AI models as a service, the good news is many of these options are open-source and free. Alternatively, AI app builders are available for a monthly subscription. Below is a summary of some popular AI app builders.
| Provider/AI service type | AWS AI | Google Cloud AI | Azure AI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Computer vision | Starting at $0.001/image or $2/hour | Starting at $4.84/hour | Starting at $1/1,000 transactions |
| NLP | Starting at $0.004/request or $0.01/minute | Starting at $8.35/1,000 records | Starting at $1/1,000 records |
| Forecasting | Starting at $0.2/1,000 data points | Starting at $0.08/node hour | Starting at $3.75/30 time series |
If you’re looking for how to build a custom AI application, you need the right hardware and infrastructure. This includes GPUs, CPUs, servers, FPGAs, and ASICs. You can see a breakdown of these infrastructure costs in the table below.
| Hardware type | Estimated cost |
|---|---|
| GPU | Starting at $10K per unit (Nvidia A100) Starting at $1.14/hr for rental |
| FPGA | $5–$100K, depending on capability |
| ASIC | Starting at $150K |
According to Dimensional Research, AI and ML projects typically require about 100,000 data samples to be effective.
If you don’t have enough training data, you can either synthetically generate the necessary volume of data or augment the data you already have. For example, creating 100,000 data points using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk could cost around $70,000.
Once you’ve acquired enough data, you need to ensure it’s high quality, which might take up to 160 hours for a data set of 100,000 samples.
In summary, gathering a robust and high-quality training data set can cost between $10,500 and $85,000, or even more. This range depends on your data’s specifics, the complexity of its annotation, and the composition and location of your AI/ML development team.
Even if you use a pre-trained AI/ML model, it needs to be adapted to your specific needs—known as model training. The expense of this training depends on the complexity of the task and the volume of data involved.
Generally, the more advanced the model, the pricier its training will be. However, there’s a catch: choosing a less expensive, underperforming cloud instance can ultimately lead to higher costs due to prolonged training times.
Here’s a comparison of various cloud instances for training costs, suggested by an author on Medium. The estimations are based on these parameters:
| Instance (AWS) | Estimated training time | Estimated cost |
|---|---|---|
| c5.2xlarge.od | 12.88 hours | $4.38 |
| c4.large.od | 46.23 hours | $4.62 |
| c6g.8xlarge.od | 6.19 hours | $6.75 |
| c6g.medium.od | 248.33 hours | $7.48 |
| c6i.large.od | 85.73 hours | $7.72 |
Estimating the cost of training an AI model from scratch without specific project details is challenging. Expenses can easily range from several thousand dollars to millions. For example, the training of ChatGPT-4 alone exceeded $100 million.
Key roles to include in your development team are:
Below are the average annual salaries for these professionals across common outsourcing destinations:
| Location/Role | Product manager | AI/ML engineer | Data engineer | Data scientist |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| India | $28K–$50K | $25K–$50K | $20K–$40K | $25K–$50K |
| Eastern Europe (Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, Ukraine) | $30K–$75K | $40K–$78K | $35K–$70K | $45K–$75K |
| Latin America | $47K–$70K | $33K–$50K | $42K–$48K | $40K–$80K |
| North America | $40K–$90K | $42K–$112K | $40K–$90K | $40K–$90K |
According to the study by Dimensional Research mentioned earlier, businesses allocate between 25% to 75% of their initial resources to the maintenance of AI/ML algorithms.
In 2024, the AI market matures, making competition tougher for newcomers. Yet, AI development has become more accessible, favoring smaller, less resource-intensive models that can be run locally on small devices.
As AI hype settles, companies focus on practical AI uses and integration, giving way to specialized solutions and presenting AI development opportunities in niche markets.
Let’s look at the main areas where AI applications are set to excel:
With the latest developments in AI, we anticipate both the positives and negatives of text-to-image technology to expand into video.
Companies like Runway are improving the quality of AI-generated videos to the point where they are almost identical to content with high production values. Major movie studios, including Paramount and Disney, are already showing interest in this technology.
The use of AI in healthcare is rapidly increasing, particularly in automating data entry and identifying patterns for research. Significant investments are flowing into drug discovery startups and initiatives to enhance diagnoses and patient care, with expectations for continued growth.
Tools like Character.ai and Prof Jim are gaining popularity among students as young as kindergarten, endorsed by educators. The demand for personalized, gamified learning experiences is expected to increase in the coming years.
Computer vision technology is improving efficiency in various sectors, with manufacturing viewing it as a key technology. AI systems are being used to detect anomalies and predict failures, boosting performance and cost-efficiency.
Developing AI applications may appear daunting, yet it promises substantial rewards through cost savings and enhanced operational efficiency. Partnering with an experienced development team who knows how to code AI well can streamline AI development, help overcome challenges, and reduce expenses. They achieve it through strategic planning and the wise selection of tools and management practices.
At Syndicode, we stay ahead of AI/ML development trends and continuously refresh our knowledge. Don’t hesitate to contact our team to discuss the best course for your project!
AI development, web or mobile, requires a solid background in computer science, mathematics, and knowledge specific to the project’s domain. It also involves a vast amount of high-quality data and might take a long time to train the model, often using significant GPU resources. Yet, it’s not overwhelmingly difficult. You can build and launch a capable model with careful planning, a skilled development team who knows how to create artificial intelligence, and some room for experimentation. Then, as you gather more data, you can refine and expand it to better meet your needs.
To successfully build and launch an AI system, you need high-quality data for training your model. Additionally, you must have a strong background in computer science, mathematics, and knowledge specific to your field. Training complex AI models also demands significant computational resources, usually from high-performance GPUs, which can be expensive. Once in use, AI systems need regular maintenance to fix problems like model drift, where the model’s performance worsens when exposed to new data. Lastly, implementing AI solutions requires careful attention to ethical issues, like bias in AI models, and legal matters, such as data privacy regulations.
The time needed to develop an AI application can vary widely, depending on the complexity of the AI model, the quality and amount of training data, the app’s goals, and the team’s expertise and resources. Basic AI features like image recognition, chatbots, or simple predictive analytics may take a few weeks to months, especially when leveraging existing AI models and cloud services to speed up development. Custom AI models for tasks like personalized recommendations, advanced natural language processing, or tailored computer vision projects take longer, ranging from 3 to 12 months. This includes data collection and preparation, model design and training, and AI integration. Projects involving novel research or highly specialized AI models could extend beyond a year, requiring extensive R&D, large datasets, and significant computational resources. Additionally, AI development doesn’t end at launch. Continuous investment is needed for ongoing training, performance maintenance, and updates based on user feedback.
For small projects or applications using pre-trained models, the costs are relatively low, ranging from a few thousand to tens of thousands of dollars. However, for custom AI solutions, especially those requiring extensive data collection and processing, unique model development, and significant computational resources, the costs can quickly escalate to hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars.