AI & Analytics

While AI promises endless possibilities, it is by no means a silver bullet. The business impact is only as good as the specificity and accuracy of your models and the quality of data that powers them. Furthermore, you need to ensure that you have the right skillset to operationalize and maintain the deployed pipelines and models.

Adastra, as a leader in the data & AI space, will work collaboratively with your subject matter experts to choose the right AI services and accelerators or design and build customized AI solutions geared towards your particular use cases. When choosing the right solution, we factor in many requirements such as the potential ongoing operational expenses, interoperability with the rest of your organization’s data and technology landscape, maintainability, accuracy, explainability, and the solution support team. We leverage our deep technical expertise, coupled with decades of industry experience, to create valuable, specialized solutions that strike the right balance given your requirements and use cases. We work closely with our Data Governance and Data Engineering experts to ensure that your models are based on clean, trusted data.

Our overall AI project methodology is aimed at solving your business problem as efficiently and effectively as possible. Our overall methodology breaks the solution process into 3 simple phases: preparation, modelling, and finalization. The first phase encompasses business and data preparation and focusses on understanding the optimal points where AI can augment your process while subsequently consolidating your data for downstream analytical modelling. The model development phase is iterative, optimizing data engineering pipelines and model complexity keeping in mind accuracy and development efforts required. The final phase focusses on model orchestration and enablement with the defining of monitoring and feedback mechanisms, which allow for easier ongoing maintenance and solution improvements.

Adastra’s AI & Analytics team possesses both stellar academic credentials as well as decades of industry experience. Our in-house experts hold specializations in the areas of mathematical modelling, simulations and optimizations, data engineering, and business intelligence.

We work closely with academic institutions and have an ongoing partnership with the Intelligent Control and Estimation (ICE) Laboratory in the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Guelph. Adastra is also a member of the Scale AI community, a Government of Canada-supported supercluster aimed at boosting the adoption and integration of AI in supply chains.

Many of our AI & Analytics models are custom-built to meet the unique needs of our clients, and because of custom training and refinement, offer a high degree of accuracy for your specific business problems, which can often be a limitation of plug-and-play solutions. However, if there are particular AI services that do meet your specific business need, we will propose these to minimize technical debt. Over the years, we have built many types of solutions for different industries. Some of our areas of expertise are listed below:

• AI Operations – Configure automated capture of telemetry and retraining of models to optimize AI model performance and receive relevant notifications to capture specific information in real-time. We can support the deployment and integration of the models into business processes and reports while adhering to model management and governance best practices. We have supported clients with the deployment of workloads in batch and with secured API deployments for real-time inferencing. We work collaboratively with our architecture specialists to adhere to specialized security constraints, ensuring that our design and deployment architecture aligns to your organization’s needs.

• Explainable AI platforms – Enable a robust set of techniques and libraries to provide explanations of influence and the impact variables have at a holistic and individual prediction level. There are several implementations that have added significant value for our clients including specific ad hoc statistical tests, methodology-specific variable importance plotting, and comprehensive explainable AI simulations. Depending on the audit requirements and completeness of information required, we can ensure that we provide the proper context for the predictions made. This can provide valuable process-centric rules for business action planning as well as to understand/quantify potential business impacts based on variable adjustments. We can also build visualizations to help you summarize explainable AI outcomes, so you have a simple view into why specific predictions were made and to understand optimal decisions.

• Capability and Technology Strategy - Whether you are beginning to augment your organization’s processes with AI or have an experienced AI team, it can be difficult to optimize use cases and prioritize and align use case requirements with team skillset. Through analytics & AI strategy and road-mapping engagements, we have helped our clients to align and plan for required trainings and competencies, determine the most effective toolkit to enable internal resources, optimize and prioritize analytics & AI use cases, and determine their organization’s comprehensive analytics & AI roadmap. Furthermore, as a premier partner for the top 3 Cloud providers, we can help you build and leverage AI models that work well on the Cloud platform of your choosing and align development and architectural strategy to your internal resource skillset and security mandates. Adastra’s experts can also facilitate multi-cloud analytics and design solutions that work effectively across clouds.