Building AI infrastructure can be an expensive ordeal accessible only to the top companies that can afford it. While there are vendors that offer a piece of the AI puzzle requiring you to invest lots of time and money to build the infrastructure, Adam Oliner, Founder and CEO of Graft, believes their company is the first to have a platform that offers an all-in-one package for distilling AI infrastructure and workflows. The company hopes that its platform will lower the entry level for companies wanting to leverage AI, while providing a solution for the talent shortage in engineers that specialize in modern AI technology. “Not only does Graft obviate the need to build this infrastructure yourself in the first place, but if you want to build a use case inside of Graft, you also don't need to have data science or machine learning expertise. We are building Graft so that you don't need to have that talent on your team in order to use it,” says Oliner, in this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk. Key highlights of this video interview are: One of the barriers to entry for many organizations to do production AI is a lack of appropriate infrastructure, and bringing in a team to build it is expensive. Oliner describes the problems around organizations adopting production AI and why he set out to found Graft and work to democratize AI. Oliner explains how top AI companies are similarly building and maintaining their AI infrastructure as a central focal point rather than building end-to-end use case specific pipelines and the benefits of this approach. Whereas previously organizations have had to start from scratch building everything, Oliner explains why Graft is trying to build representations that are versatile so can be leveraged by a wide range of customers and not just for common use cases. Oliner goes into detail about the infrastructure they are helping organizations build and why Graft’s offering is unique. He discusses how Graft is helping aspects around monitoring, observability, robustness, and reliability so that the customer doesn’t have to. There is a talent shortage within the subset of engineers that specialize in modern AI technology. Oliner explains how they are helping to bridge that gap by providing an alternative to hiring that team and rather building it out internally. Graft’s offering means organizations do not need to have that talent on their team in order to use it; however, Oliner believes that organizations who do have a machine learning team will also reap the benefits. He explains how Graft lowers the entry level for organizations and the benefits of doing so.