Today, we are witnessing an increasing adoption of mobile devices for messaging, telecommunications, video conferencing, online shopping, entertainment, and remote operations, all becoming possible through applications and data on devices. According to Statista, there are around 3.5 billion smartphone users in the world which means 44.98% of the global populations have access to a smartphone and the rising curve depicts that it is not stopping anywhere soon. To tap this potential, businesses across the globe have started drifting to mobile applications to increase their brand visibility, build customer loyalty, provide better customer experience, and to form a direct marketing channel with their prospects and customers.
While a website is the most common channel that businesses use to display their products and services to their customers, mobile applications are on a rise to capture an audience on the move. Generally, commuters prefer to find the smartest and quickest way to work to fulfill their requirements. A mobile application steers it exactly right with a custom dashboard, RSS feeds, personalized ads, features, and accessibility thus giving it an edge to a mobile website.
While there are so many technologies that businesses are using in their mobile apps such as location-based tracking, Augmented Reality, Connected Sensors, payment integrations, however, Artificial intelligence has penetrated our mobility and application world in a great sense. AI-based mobile applications are trying to solve problems and perform tasks that we could not have even imagined a couple of decades ago. Some of the well-known experiences of AI applications are our mobile device smart assistants with the likes of Alexa, Siri, Cortana, or Google Assistant, which gives us a hands-free experience through voice recognition capabilities. Besides software, even the hardware companies are recognizing the true potential of AI applications, as more of the hardware manufacturers are developing and integrating AI chips in their hardware.
AI application offers immense benefits to businesses by seamlessly integrating into functions for greater security, functionality, and experience at a much lesser cost. If you are speculating on how much it costs to develop an AI mobile application for your business, then we can help you break-down this in various steps –
Phases of an AI App Development Project
An AI application project encompasses various features, functionalities, technologies including data analytics algorithms, machine learning, and deep learning systems, database, framework, APIs, logic, cognitive science, and more to create a personalised experience for consumers and business buyers. The lifecycle of an AI mobile application begins with business finding its objectives and then working on those with their requirements to estimate the costs.
Identification of Business Goals
Collecting the business challenges and then classifying the efficiencies that the business is trying to solve by incorporating AI systems could act as a good starting point in the development process. The important components such as application objectives, components, type of users, business requirements, and important AI app development features, and flow should be jotted down to decide on building an application. It is important to determine the need for an application that is set to achieve attainable goals.
Once a strategy is produced then the business will be in a decisive stage on determining what to seek and integrate into the app concerning its use cases and the business value. Cost implications will involve time on internal research and identifying project requirements.
Researching Your Audience
AI application or software will be used by your users and there are various attributes that you should realize before jumping on the solution and creating a functional product. This phase in your AI app development project involves understanding various metrics about your target audience such as demographics, location, analytics, interactions, and recognizing what intelligent solutions you are trying to achieve and what level of solutions users are expecting.
You don’t want to spend on an Artificial Intelligence mobile application that solves the challenge which isn’t there for your user. Instead, build AI systems around solving the challenges and problems which can be easily eliminated with AI techniques in-place. This involves the collection and analysis of data from analytics tools and metrics to study your audience.
Read More: AI case Study: AI-Based Solution to Track Marketing ROI
Choosing the Right Mobile OS
While there are many mobile operating systems present in the market such as Windows, Tizen, Linux, LineageOS, KaiOS to work on your Artificial Intelligence application, however, the most dominant ones are Android and iOS with most users in the mobile market.
Mobile OS Market share
Source: https://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/os
Both Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS are the market leaders with huge backing from the community of developers, while supporters of Android environment admire the ecosystem of applications, community, and hardware of all sizes to develop applications, on the other hand, iOS users love the simple UI, smooth experience and seamless connectivity with an apple ecosystem of devices along with a high level of security.
If you want to make the right decision, you should be aware of the peculiarities of each approach, and the development process to identify a perfect system that your existing and future users will love.
When it comes to the cost of each OS, a basic Android Application development in India will cost around $13 whereas, the application development on an iOS might cost in the range of $50 and further capabilities depend on the type of AI app development project and AI technologies required.
Take sweet time to study the ins-outs of user’s presence on platforms and get inputs from different sources around the organization and through opinion from experts, who may bring new light and make your application development process well-insured.
Choosing the Right App Development Strategy
Once you have an AI app development idea and a basic understanding of what you want to achieve and the type of functionalities you want in your AI/ML application, the next step is the execution. This solely depends on the strategy you choose.
In-house Development– There are times when building in-house fits the needs, starting from a blank slate and crafting your pieces together. This offers tremendous opportunities for your application to learn from the data and analytics and evolve slowly but more maturely. Since everything is developed and responded in-house, therefore, it requires smart brains involving Algorithm developers, Software Developers, Data Scientists, and Hardware technicians to support the development process. Besides this, you require an infrastructure to run and support the development means such as a private/public cloud, or hybrid or on-prem infrastructure.
The average cost for algorithm developers will be $20/hour with 3 years of experience, the cost of a data scientist will be 18/hour- with 3 years of experience, and then there’s hardware cost of approx. $6000 to run your AI code followed by hardware maintenance and personnel cost. The time, budget, and energy required to acquire these will be over and above.
Assembling Elements – Various companies in the market specialize in providing technology such as a service that you can integrate into your application instead of starting from scratch. By assembling these services, you end up quicker in time to market, however it requires tight integration of libraries, APIs, and AI capabilities to provide meaningful support to your in-house team and application users. Now, these services might be available as an open-source or might present as a module which can be available as a subscription to your company. This is a good approach to reduce time to market but rather not innovating.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) — This is another approach in which instead of assembling services from various providers to create your application, you can easily take advantage of a company that already has an application and AI platform. All you require is to build a small application or interface on top of this. There are providers of such platforms that let you put your logo and lets you use the entire app from their dashboard without you spending more time to build and assemble.
Artificial Intelligence App Development Company — This flavour gives you the maximum customization and eliminates the complexities of writing code and managing your application along with AI training capabilities. The idea revolves around getting it developed from experts taking care of your application, data, UI, hosting, managing, and AI resources. Moreover, the developer experience, operations, professional services, support and maintenance, security, and peace of mind come along as a bonus perk. While many companies can do this but if you are looking to get a quality AI application, then consider a company that can understand your requirements to develop a custom solution.
Other Factors Determining the Cost of Artificial Intelligence
While you can determine your Artificial Intelligence requirements before meeting with the development companies or contractors or data scientists, its always helpful to consider additional factors that may alter the cost or may make or break your AI solutions.
An AI application demands data, quick response, and high performance to process algorithms and build a meaningful foundation by continuously learning from inputs. What you are seeking in an AI solution also influences the overall cost of AI. Moreover, the cost also depends on the data format, storage, type of structure, the accuracy of predictions, data visualization, dashboard, and more. Besides this, some other factors that can lead to additional costs are technology, design, security, speed, and the number of customizations.
The platform integrations with CI/CD, external services and managed services, development of architecture, testing, security operations, training machine algorithms also take time, therefore time is also an essence that should be considered in your overall AI project cost.
Choosing a pre-built solution or a third-party AI software such as chatbot to integrate with a CRM will be featured with a fixed cost or a plan in the range of $0 to $30,000, whereas a custom AI solution might cost $20000 to $300,000 / solution.
Make the Call
A decade back, only large enterprises and corporations could afford to build and integrate AI in their applications. Now with the advancement of infrastructure and technologies and the decreasing costs, even start-ups and SMEs can manage to scale and leverage the power of cloud involving Virtual Machines, GPUs, and other AI software and tools.
Looking at the future, modern applications will witness a revolution with AI-based experiences to provide a level of prediction, accuracy, and personalization we have not experienced before. Building an AI-powered solution depends on dozens of decisions and factors, however, once it implemented, the savings it would bring with the integration in business efforts will deliver the worth with immense benefits in reduced costs, automated processes, and increased value to customers.
At Quytech, we understand the ins and outs of AI & modern AI applications with our in-depth experience in analytics, cross-industry solutions, ML/DL, forecasting, computer vision, and more. Our team of experts with years of experience and expertise will help you finalize your AI App specification, prototype & development. Get in touch with us for your custom AI Application solution. Explore our work
