COVER STORY
Rise Of The AI Builders Some forward-thinking solution providers have spent years building artificial intelligence practices, and today their bets are paying off as businesses rush to figure out how to take advantage of generative AI.
By Dylan Martin
W hen Asif Hasan and his colleagues ditched well-paying jobs in 2013 to start a new company that builds artificial intelligence solutions for enterprises, they assumed fast growth would quickly follow. They had seen the promise ofAI in research that demonstrated the real-world feasibility of deep learning, a complex but pow- erful machine learning method that mimics the way the brain absorbs information and now serves as the foundation for many AI applications today. Hasan also knew that there was “space in the market for a new type of solution provider that brings these capabilities to the enterprise” from challenges he experienced trying to find outsourced data science talent when he was director of business analytics at Philips Healthcare. The problem was the market wasn’t quite ready when Hasan and his three co-founders started Quantiphi. Business was slower than expected in the first few years, and the Marlborough, Mass.-based company mostly got by onAI proofs of concept while doing larger work around advanced analytics and data science. “We were obviously, in hindsight, quite early because the first three years for us were very, very difficult,” said Hasan. But instead
of second-guessing themselves, Hasan and his team stayed patient. They believed the time would come when Quantiphi’s AI services would surge in demand, and in due time they were right. Ten years after its founding, Quantiphi boasts a workforce of nearly 4,000 people, and the “AI-first digital engineering com- pany” has racked up 2,500 projects with 350 customers in nine industries, including a handful of large-scaleAI engagements each worth around $10 million a year.This has helped fuel a compound annual growth rate of 85 percent for the past three years. “Eventually the momentum kicked in, and then we were off to the races,” Hasan said. While AI technologies are fueling new features in myriad software applications and cloud services for the channel to resell, manage and provide services around, solution providers like Quantiphi are seizing on a profit-rich opportunity at the literal ground floor: the fast-growing need for infrastructure and services underpinning AI applications and features. This group of solution providers, which ranges from newer companies like Quantiphi to storied companies likeWorldWide Technology, have spent the past several years building AI prac- tices. Now they stand to benefit from what IDC estimates could be a $154 billion market for AI-centric systems this year. The
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JUNE 2023
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