DALLAS and MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Oct. 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --
What's the news? AT&T and H2O.ai jointly built
an artificial intelligence (AI) feature store to manage and reuse
data and machine learning engineering capabilities. The AI Feature
Store houses and distributes the features data scientists,
developers and engineers need to build AI models. The AI Feature
Store is in production at AT&T, meeting the high levels of
performance, reliability and scalability required to meet
AT&T's demand. Today, AT&T and H2O.ai are announcing that
the same solution in production at AT&T, including all its
industry-first capabilities, will now be available as the "H2O AI
Feature Store" to any company or organization.
What is a feature store? Data scientists and AI
experts use data engineering tools to create "features," which are
a combination of relevant data and derived data that predict an
outcome (e.g., churn, likely to buy, demand forecasting). Building
features is time consuming work, and typically data scientists
build features from scratch every time they start a new project.
Data scientists and AI experts spend up to 80% of their time on
feature engineering, and because teams do not have a way to share
this work, the same work is repeated by teams throughout the
organization. Also, it is important that features are available for
both training and real-time inference to avoid training-serving
skew which causes model performance problems and contributes
to project failure. Feature stores allow data scientists to build
more accurate features and deploy these features in production in
hours instead of months. Until now there weren't places to store
and access features from previous projects. As data and AI are and
will continue to be important to every business, demand is growing
to make these features reusable. Feature stores are seen as a
critical component of the infrastructure stack for machine learning
because they solve the hardest problem with operationalizing
machine learning—building and serving machine learning data to
production.
How is AT&T using its feature store? AT&T carries
more than 465 petabytes of data traffic across its global network
on an average day. When you add in the data generated internally
from our different applications, in our stores, among our field
technicians, and across other parts of our business, turning data
into actionable intelligence as quickly as possible is vital to our
success. AT&T's implementation of the AI Feature Store has been
instrumental in helping turn this massive trove of data into
actionable intelligence.
Who will use the H2O AI Feature Store? We know other
organizations feel the same way about making their own data
actionable. H2O.ai, the leading AI cloud platform provider, has
co-developed the feature store with us, and now together we are
offering the production-tested feature store as a software platform
for other companies and organizations to use with their own data.
From financial services to health organizations and pharmaceutical
makers, retail, software developers and more, we know the demand
for reliable, easy-to-use, and secure feature stores is booming.
Any organization currently using AI or planning to use AI will want
to consider the value of a feature store. We expect customers to
use the H2O AI Feature Store for forecasting, personalization and
recommendation engines, dynamic pricing optimization, supply chain
optimization, logistics and transportation optimization, and more.
We are using the feature store at AT&T for network
optimization, fraud prevention, tax calculations and predictive
maintenance.
The H2 AI Feature Store includes industry-first capabilities,
including integration with multiple data and machine learning
pipelines, which can be applied to an on-premise data lake or by
leveraging cloud and SaaS providers.
The H2O AI Feature Store also includes Automatic Feature
Recommendations, an industry first, which let data scientists
select the features they want to update and improve and receive
recommendations to do so. The H2O AI Feature Store recommends new
features and feature updates to improve the AI model performance.
The data scientists review the suggested updates and accept the
recommendations they want to include.
What are people saying?
"Feature stores are one of the hottest areas of AI development
right now, because being able to reuse and repurpose data
engineering tools is critical as those tools become increasingly
complex and expensive to build," said Andy
Markus, Chief Data Officer, AT&T. "These storehouses are
vital not only to our own work, but to other businesses, as well.
With our expertise in managing and analyzing huge data flows,
combined with H2O.ai's deep AI expertise, we understand what
business customers are looking for in this space and our Feature
Store offering meets this need."
"Data is a team sport and collaboration with domain experts is
key to discovering and sharing features. Feature Stores are the
digital 'water coolers' for data science," said Sri Ambati, CEO and founder of H2O.ai. "We are
building AI right into the Feature Store and have taken an open,
modular and scalable approach to tightly integrate into the diverse
feature engineering pipelines while preserving sub-millisecond
latencies needed to react to fast-changing business conditions.
AI-powered feature stores focus on discoverability and reuse by
automatically recommending highly predictive features to our
customers using FeatureRank™. AT&T has built a world-class data
and AI team and we are privileged to collaborate with them on their
AI journey."
To learn more about H2O AI Feature Store please visit
http://www.h2o.ai/feature-store and sign up to join our preview
program or for a demo.
Please join AT&T and H2O.ai on October 28th at 2:00 PT CT at AT&T Business Summit for a
discussion on the future of AI as a Service. Register at
https://register-bizsummit.att.com
*About AT&T Communications
We help family, friends and neighbors connect in meaningful ways
every day. From the first phone call 140+ years ago to mobile video
streaming, we @ATT innovate to improve lives. AT&T
Communications is part of AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T). For more
information, please visit us at att.com.
*About H2O.ai
H2O.ai is the leading AI cloud company, on a mission to democratize
AI for everyone. Customers use the H2O AI Hybrid Cloud platform to
rapidly solve complex business problems and accelerate the
discovery of new ideas. H2O.ai is the trusted AI provider to
more than 20,000 global organizations, including AT&T,
Allergan, Bon Secours Mercy Health, Capital One, Commonwealth Bank
of Australia, GlaxoSmithKline,
Hitachi, Kaiser Permanente, Procter & Gamble, PayPal, PwC,
Reckitt, Unilever and Walgreens, over half of the Fortune 500 and
one million data scientists. Goldman Sachs, NVIDIA and Wells Fargo
are not only customers and partners, but strategic investors in the
company. H2O.ai's customers have honored the company with a Net
Promoter Score (NPS) of 78— the highest in the industry based
on breadth of technology and deep employee expertise. The world's
top 20 Kaggle Grandmasters (the community of best-in-the-world
machine learning practitioners and data scientists) are
employees of H2O.ai. A strong AI for Good ethos to make the world a
better place and Responsible AI drive the company's purpose. Please
join our movement at www.h2O.ai.
View original content to download
multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/att-and-h2oai-launch-co-developed-artificial-intelligence-feature-store-with-industry-first-capabilities-301410998.html
SOURCE AT&T Communications