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Feature stores Scaling machine learning for business transformation

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However, this will be stalled without the ability to scale AI and one of the biggest obstacles to overcome, is how to meet the demands of the business in a timeframe and cost that is compelling.

To truly leverage data assets, businesses need to collapse the time it takes to train, deploy and manage their machine learning models.

At the heart of their ability to achieve this lies the feature store.

Whilst growing in prominence and importance, awareness of feature stores as a tool to unlock business value, remains low.

Indeed, when you Google the term ‘feature stores’ very little appears.

Failure to adopt feature store technology could affect your ability to compete or maintain and grow market share.

And in enterprise adoption of machine learning, speed to deployment beats better models every time.

Our team of machine learning strate-gists will help you to scale out your ma-chine learning ambitions whilst enhanc-ing your existing investments, helping you to comply with increasing compli-ance and regulatory requirements.

We will establish your feature store readiness by looking at where you are today and what the opportunities are to leverage machine learning in order to propel your business forward.

We will match your use cases to the investment case in a feature store to accelerate the rate at which you could deploy machine learning.

From there we will determine what success looks like for your business, whilst establishing a way forward with a roadmap towards successful scaling of your machine learning operations and, ultimately, business transformation.

Businesses are on the cusp of a Cambrian explosion in the field of machine and deep learning.

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Feature stores will do for machine learning what the cloud did for big data – enabling the industrialisation of data pipelines to feed machine learning models and release your business’ AI potential.

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Improve decision-making) Having a feature store will allow insight into what data is important and common across your machine learning models.

This will give insight into where to invest in data collection and data quality to further improve your data and business decision-making quality.

Improve decision fidelity In an age of increasing data governance, feature stores should form an integral part of your organisation’s governance model, tracking feature drift and highlight areas of concern proactively.

The ‘decision vault’ that a feature store provides will ensure decision fidelity, allowing you to justify historical business decisions.

What are the business drivers?

Increase ability to scale As common machine learning archetypes start to evolve, being able to scale your data management capability to server consistent feature sets is vital.

Feature stores allow your machine learning team to scale up considerably, investing in data curation and collection, whilst creating a solid foundation to manage both your training data and feature serving.

Improve business efficiency Having a feature store could revolutionise the resource you have by placing less burden on your data science team, freeing up time which can be deployed training models elsewhere in the business.

Create monetisation potential The ability of feature stores to define and store large amounts of highly curated features and track change over time, represents a potentially lucrative opportunity for both the machine learning teams and the wider organisation.

This data can then be packaged and sold as a feature service.

Feature store assessment

The feature store is a centralised feature hub where you curate all the features, data and decisions that your business has ever made. It allows you to industrialise your data pipeline by creating highly curated data sets to train your machine learning models and serve features at model evaluation time.

With our help, we can ensure your business is feature store ready so that you can:

The first phase of this process is to prepare your business for the trialling of feature store technology.

It’s about a rapid assimilation of your data estate to identify candidate data sources for feature generation.

This process prepares the environment and data required to target a set of models that will be used in the trialling of the feature store technology.

As part of this, you will participate in workshops and bring specific problems, issues and needs to the table so that we can craft a comprehensive set of success criteria for a feature store trial.

The aim of this phase is to immerse your data engineers and data scientists in best practice from data pipelines, feature management and operations, to enable feature store implementation and management.

This will provide the insight into how a feature store-enabled way of working can accelerate and scale your machine learning deployments.

As part of this, you would deploy data engineers and data scientists to the trial project so they get hands on experience and are part of the trial team.

This stage is all about deciding on the way forward. We provide the roadmap, costs and timelines needed to fully deploy a feature store in your business.

This will inform your decision on whether or not to progress with a feature store.

You would need to dedicate a project manager to work alongside our team for a two-week period to work through the roadmap, costings and final report.

Phase 1: Preparation

(2 weeks)

Phase 3: Decision (2 weeks)

Phase 2: Trial

(8 weeks)

How we help

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Execution of feature store trial

Executing your feature store trial will enable you to deploy new features faster, delivering quicker results.

It will give your teams insight into what it will take to deploy, manage and operate a feature store and will

transition your team to a new skill set, to execute the new platform. As part of this process we would explore the costs and timescales necessary to invest in a feature store for the longer term.

Drawing on the expertise of our DevOps and DataOps specialists, we will guide you on your journey towards the successful scale out of machine learning in your business, using the feature store.

With the 6point6 feature store readiness assessment, we will help

you understand what data you have and the areas of machine learning that you could target.

We will then produce a business case for feature store technology to inform your decision to invest in this area.

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AI – we’ve come a long way, but the road to business transformation is long.

AI has branched out into many different forms over the years, from the rise of deep learning based on neural networks to vast amounts of cheap compute.

We expect to see huge advancements in the real-world applications of AI in enterprise over the coming years.

Whilst the majority of businesses already use AI, many simply use it to automate straightforward tasks.

Training machine learning models is the easy bit.

If businesses are to make the most of what AI has to offer, however, then they need to scale the use of it in their organisations which is where the feature store comes in.

But the journey towards business transformation of this kind is long, and at the start of it, needs to be a high level of governance.

Knowing where your data comes from has never been more important - especially for those businesses operating in highly regulated sectors like financial and professional services.

The ability to trace back the lineage of your data will help to establish whether your machine learning model will be trained correctly or not.

It is therefore important to have a level of feature governance baked into your feature store, because failure to do so will carry with it not only regulatory risk, but reputational risk too.

Our expertise

Our Thoughts

Our data platforms practice specialises in data strategy, technology delivery and adoption as well as transition to data operations.

We bring the right blend of both delivery expertise and innovative data solutions to solve our clients’ most pressing needs.

What sets us apart is our ability to define a strategy which is deliverable, not just what you want to hear.

Our advice is rooted in real world experience and is delivered by highly skilled practitioners capable of executing it.

Knowing where your data comes from has never been more important

Get in touchGARY RICHARDSON

Managing DirectorEmerging Technologiesgary.richardson@6point6.co.uk

About 6point6

Integrating digital technology into your business can result in fundamental changes to how you operate and deliver value to your customers. To go digital is to reinvent yourself to the core, opening yourself and your clients to a world of possibilities.

6point6 is a technology consultancy. We bring a wealth of hands-on experience to help businesses achieve more with digital.

Using cutting edge technology and agile delivery methods, we help you reinvent, transform and secure a brighter digital future.

Visit us at 6point6.co.uk Twitter: @6point6ltd LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/6point6

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