The three types of AI products.
The differentiation between AI products requires different problems to solve for your users.
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to revolutionize the world of technology, businesses are exploring new ways to apply this technology to their products and services. Companies are designing and developing three main types of AI products: standalone AI products, in-app AI products, and AI-powered platforms. Let’s take a closer look at each of these options.
Standalone
Standalone AI products are entirely focused on providing a specific AI-driven solution. These products are developed to solve a specific problem or provide a specific service, and they often operate independently of other software or systems.
Best practice
Grammarly is an AI-powered writing assistant that checks grammar, punctuation, and style, and provides suggestions for improvement. It’s standalone because it purely uses AI to improve your writing. UX design → Designing for a standalone comes with different expectations for users since the user expects different outcomes (e.g. check punctuation vs iterate writing style) every time they interact with the tool.
In-app
In-app AI products are different in that they are integrated into an existing product or service. These products use AI to enhance the user experience, make recommendations, or provide more personalised content. In-app AI products can be found in a variety of applications, from social media to e-commerce sites to mobile banking apps.
Best practice
Google Workspace incorporates AI for smart replies, email categorisation, grammar suggestions, and document auto-completion (Smart Compose). Their tools are in-app because not everything Google does is (yet) AI-powered.
UX design → With in-app always consider if AI technology answers to user needs and brings it the value it can give. Ask questions like: Does it make the user complete tasks faster, easier, or better? What if there is no AI, what won’t improve?
AI-powered platform
Another type of AI product is an AI-powered platform. These platforms are designed to enable other developers to create AI products and solutions on top of them. Essentially, they act as a foundation for other companies to build upon.
Best practice
An excellent example of an AI-powered platform is IBM’s Watson, which provides a range of services, including data analysis, natural language processing, and machine learning. IBM’s Watson has been used to create a host of other AI products, from chatbots to virtual assistants.
UX design → The general user needs include deriving insights, summarizing, and categorizing data from existing data. The goal is to make sense of a big pile of data in a faster, easier, and higher-quality way. This means that you design with the ideal output as the user objective, based on source data that already exists.
Conclusion
Businesses looking to leverage AI technology have several options when it comes to designing and developing AI products. We’ve covered three of the most popular options: standalone AI products, in-app AI products, and AI-powered platforms. Each of these options offers different benefits and drawbacks, so it’s important to choose the right one for your specific use case. By understanding the options available to you, you can create AI-driven products that meet the needs of your customers and help your business stay ahead of the curve.
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