In this chapter, we saw that AI can play a crucial role in a larger system, a role that enables new functionality that can form the basis of a product or service. However, in practice, the AI component is actually quite small when compared to the code and time spent on surrounding issues such as the user interface, handling messy input and correcting bad outputs, and all the issues intrinsic to working in software teams larger than one. In any event, the AI component is also often the most complex part of an intelligent software system, and special care must be taken to get it right. We've introduced an AI workflow that ensures that the benefits of building and deploying AI have a hope of outweighing the costs of initial development and continued monitoring and maintenance. This chapter also introduced the projects that make up the bulk of this book.

In the next chapter, we follow the AI workflow with an AI cloud resource planning project that will prove to be useful in several other projects.