How Azure AI Changed Ocean Smart

This book is intended to teach you how to apply Azure Cognitive Services to everyday business opportunities where some efficiency can be gained, some cost can be saved, or some unknown or misunderstood insight can be unveiled. We will start with a brief introduction of why and how Azure Cognitive Services is helping with those processes.

Next, we will give an overview of our fictitious seafood company, Ocean Smart. The operational challenges that are outlined are based on the authors' experience working in the seafood industry for over 15 years in various capacities as consultants, technicians, developers, process improvers, and an executive. The examples provided, however, could be applied to many organizations, whether they are manufacturing companies or not. Of course, some of the examples are specific to manufacturing but can be applied to many different examples across various industries and verticals.

From there, we will take the examples provided and develop a plan for evaluating and building a case to present what the return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO) will be to implement these types of solutions. This will be done with guidance on ideating ways to create insight around the value of the implementations—in other words, what efficiency can be gained, how much cost can be saved, or how many insights can be brought forward in tangible examples. These examples can then be presented to the key stakeholders and project sponsors in your organization to get their approval to move ahead with the project.

These examples, of course, will be applied differently at every organization as there are variable values related to building each example that will be different depending on the industry, country, or even region of the country in which you reside.

Wrapping up the chapter, we will look at some architectural guidelines based on successfully implemented use cases that align with the examples we present later in the book to get a taste of which other services will be deployed as part of the overall solution and technologies that will accompany the Cognitive Services you will be configuring in each of the use cases.

We'll go through the following sections:

• Choosing Azure Cognitive Services
• The Ocean Smart story
• Building your case: calculating ROI and TCO