NVIDIA and HPE hop on board the AI accessibility train

Dive Brief:

AI and augmented reality are set to create a digital disruption in the delivery industry, according to an Accenture report. Driverless delivery vehicles and robots are among the technologies set to facilitate the link from products and services to customers. But the post and parcel industry is not the first to see sweeping changes from these technologies, and tech companies are responding with better tools for development and adoption.
NVIDIA, for example, is offering a cloud-based container registry for users of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud P3 instances, according to a company announcement Wednesday. The no-cost tool offers developers tools for democratized AI, such as powerful GPUs through the cloud and a performance-tuned deep learning software stack.
Hewlett Packard Enterprises unveiled products and services for AI adoption, particularly with a deep learning focus, according to an announcement Wednesday. The new offerings include rapid software installation for AI, a deep learning "cookbook," image classification tools and a long-term innovation center.

Dive Insight:

Digital disruption in the mailing industry is not unexpected. UPS has been testing deploying autonomous vehicles, virtual assistants and drones for some time, and CIO Juan Perez laid out a future vision of "autonomous everything" for the company in 2016. Mobile tools came on to speed up UPS’ onboarding process in early October.

Implementing advanced tech, however, is no easy feat, not even for UPS and its $1 billion tech budget. A drought in AI talent, coupled with skyrocketing salaries, means most companies cannot hire an AI team to integrate the tech into business operations.

New service provider offerings, such as those from HPE and NVIDIA, are key to making AI technology more accessible. Service providers are helping overcome the lack of AI personnel with services and products that more tech professionals, and rudimentary AI professionals, can pick up easier. AWS and Microsoft partnered on an open source interface, Gluon, to open machine learning and deep learning up to more developers