Building a Proof of Concept: the first step to validating your idea

AI 2021 Mar 17, 2021

Many entrepreneurial leaders find themselves in the same position - they identify a problem in their organisation or industry that represents a significant upside if solved. They understand the problem and know that AI can probably solve it, but how to turn this idea into reality?

There are many decisions that business leaders will have to make when it comes to adopting innovation. One of the first is whether to try to use an off-the-shelf solution or whether to build a bespoke and proprietary solution. Buying an off-the-shelf AI product can be quick and easy to get started and is often the default assumption. However, it may come with other difficulties including customisation limitations that impede performance, being locked into a specific vendor and increased risk if the vendor ceases to offer the utilised service. What is more, off-the-shelf solutions result in no intellectual property (IP) ownership and use your data to make their product better. Building bespoke might take longer and entail more up-front cost but may be more financially and commercially viable in the long-term and will also result in a solution that is perfectly customised to your business needs.

If you decide to build bespoke, best-practice is to begin with what is called a Proof of Concept or PoC. A PoC is designed to assess feasibility and acquire learnings that will shape development and validate further investment: you want to avoid investing a large amount of money up-front in a solution before you know it will work and can be scaled. A key challenge is that in order to build a good PoC, you need a diverse range of expertise that will also be required for the development of a full solution, including data scientists, data engineers, full-stack developers and a DevOps specialist. The recruitment costs alone for each of these specialist resources is between £35 - £50K – and that is before you have even built and tested the basic concept.

Brainpool offers a fast and easy alternative - outsource the development of a PoC to Brianpool. We already have all the expertise required to validate AI projects in-house and within the Brainpool network and have vast experience building AI solutions across a range of industries. Brainpool can build a Proof of Concept and validate your idea with the same budget as recruiting 1 data scientist.

If you want to turn your idea into reality quickly, efficiently and with confidence get in touch with our team: [email protected]

Brainpool AI

Brainpool is an artificial intelligence consultancy specialising in developing bespoke AI solutions for business.