Why “AI Platform” Means Three Different Things
Search for “AI platforms for business” and you get a jumble: TensorFlow, IBM Watson, ChatGPT, Rasa, and SageMaker all appearing in the same list.
From a business buyer’s perspective, these tools have almost nothing in common:
- TensorFlow is an open-source library for building machine learning models.
- ChatGPT is a conversational assistant.
- SageMaker is a cloud infrastructure service for training and deploying ML models.
Lumping them together as “AI platforms” is like listing a cement mixer, a general contractor, and a finished apartment under “housing solutions.” They belong to different stages of different kinds of work.
Before you compare options, the more useful question is: what kind of buyer are you?
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Three Buyer Types and the Platform Category for Each
1. The Builder
The Builder has ML engineers or data scientists on staff. Their goal is to:
- Train custom models on proprietary data
- Deploy them in their own infrastructure
- Own the full technical stack end to end
Platforms like Google Vertex AI, Amazon SageMaker, and Azure AI Services are built for this profile. They: