Picture this: You walk into a Macy’s store, taking a break from the virtual world to indulge in the tactile experience of brick-and-mortar shopping.As you enter, a tall and broad-shouldered Android named Friday greets you warmly.“Welcome back, Lucy. How are you doing today? Did you like the pink sweater you bought last week?”Taken aback by the personal touch, you reply, “I’m doing well, thank you. I’m actually looking for a blouse to go with that sweater.”Friday engages you in conversation, subtly inquiring about your preferences, until finally, the smart mirror built into its torso lights up. It scans your body and overlays selected clothing options on your avatar. Impressed?Now, with a nod of your head, one of Friday’s minions retrieves your chosen attire and some matching accessories, and leads you to the next available dressing room.Sci-fi has been dreaming (not always positively) about this kind of thing for decades — can you believe that Minority Report came out more than 20 years ago?But at last the future is here. This is the evolving reality in retail, healthcare, agriculture, and a wide range of other sectors, thanks to rapid maturation of artificial intelligence (AI). From self-driving cars and other autonomous vehicles, to fruit-picking robots and AI medical imaging diagnoses, AI is now truly everywhere.As enchanting as the customer experience in our Macy’s scenario seems, the technological orchestration behind it is no less impressive.When we say “AI” we are probably talking about the seamless integration of so many different technologies:And of course behind it all, an up-to-date, vectorized database of available store merchandise and customer records.When I said that AI has been maturing rapidly, I wasn’t kidding. These complex capabilities are now really in reach of every business, including yours, thanks to a blooming landscape of open source technologies and simple SaaS products.I recently built a demo mimicking this interactive personal shopping experience. It’s not quite Friday, and it’s not in an android body — but it is in your browser for you to try out right here.By the way: as someone who doesn’t code as much as I used to, I was still able to implement this entire stack in less than a day, and most of the time was wrestling with CSS to make rounded corners! The actual TTS, STT, and LLM portions were relatively easy, using the amazing OpenAI APIs.Of course, in the real world, I probably wouldn’t want to send my corporate data into the bowels of OpenAI, which is why I strongly urge you to check out our open source LocalAI project, which enables you to run the whole lot on-prem.Today, training and deep learning of models happens at huge expense in clouds and data centers, because it’s so computationally intensive. Many of the core processing and services we talk about above run on cloud services, where they can easily scale and be managed.But for actual business-critical inferencing work in the real world, retail assistants and other AI workloads probably shouldn’t live in the cloud. They need to live at the edge. In fact, we believe the natural home for most AI workloads will be running at the edge of the network.Why? Distributed computing puts processing power and compute resources closer to the user and the business process. It sidesteps several key challenges:Anyone who has tried deploying edge computing infrastructure at scale, whether on Kubernetes or another platform, will tell you that it’s hard work.You’ll be confronted with challenges around deploying and onboarding hardware, on an ongoing basis. How can you get your Friday android booted and active when there’s no IT expert in the store to ninja the CLI?You have to address security, when devices may be vulnerable to physical tampering. At minimum you need to consider encryption and a means of verifying device trust, at boot and beyond.And you need to manage hardware and software stacks at scale, from monitoring to patching. This itself is a major challenge when considering the hardware limitations of small form-factor edge devices, and the intermittent connectivity between the device and management infrastructure back at HQ. You need an architecture with zero-risk updates and the ability to run effectively in an air-gap environment.Adding AI into edge environments introduces further layers of complexity. It’s not just infrastructure you need to manage now, but also:Models: Your data scientists have an overwhelming number of ready-made datasets and models to choose from on popular repositories like Hugging Face. How can you help them quickly try out and deploy these models — and then keep them up to date on a daily or weekly basis?AI engines: Engines such as Seldon, BentoML and Kserve need constant maintenance, updates, and tuning for optimal performance. Updating these across many locations becomes tedious and error-prone.AI models process incoming data in real time, turning raw inputs like voice commands or sensor readings into actionable insights or personalized interactions. AI engines such as Seldon, BendoML and Kserve run those AI models. Think of it like this: AI models are workloads, and the AI engine is the runtime in which these models are executed.This is the problem space we’ve been attacking as we build Palette EdgeAI, announced today.Palette EdgeAI helps you deploy and manage the complete stack, from the edge OS and Kubernetes infrastructure to the models powering your innovative AI apps.Without diving too deep into the feature list, EdgeAI enables you to:The integration of AI and edge computing is not just an intriguing possibility; it’s a necessity for the next leap in technology and user experience. As we stand on this exciting frontier, one thing is clear: the future of shopping, healthcare, business and many other aspects of life will be smarter, faster, and more personalized than ever.There are edge AI use cases coming for your industry, too. The growth forecasts are stratospheric: The global Edge AI software market is set to grow from $590 million in 2020 to $1.83 trillion by 2026, according to MarketsandMarkets Research.Ready to be a part of this future? Of course, you are. But the benefits of AI will only be in your grasp if you can tackle the challenges of the edge. That’s where we can help. So why not take a look at Palette EdgeAI and let us know what you think?Community created roadmaps, articles, resources and journeys fordevelopers to help you choose your path and grow in your career.