Towards AI as a Service for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SME)

AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS) combines Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud computing to make AI accessible to enterprises without implementing complex solutions or technologies on-premise. Many small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) that lack competencies in the AI and technology sector consider AIaaS as a promising option to implement AI solutions. However, the differences between AIaaS and AI on-premise have not attracted much research. The intention of this paper is to contribute to this area by analysing the literature in the field and investigating a concrete example in more detail. Exploring AIaaS is crucial to better understand the opportunities and limitations of AI services. The contributions of the paper are (a) an analysis of the literature on AIaaS to identify factors affecting AI implementation and how AIaaS solutions differ from on-premise solutions when introducing AI in a company, (b) a case study of an SME that compares AIaaS and AI on-premise in practice, and (c) the application potential of a morphological box to compare AIaaS and AI on-premise.