Software companies in Sri Lanka big and small have long since pivoted towards AI, considering the momentum that now exists in model development, prompt tuning, predictive analytics and intelligent automation. Businesses, irrespective of industry, niche or size now see the potential that AI can offer. While many have already implemented some form of AI into their current workflows, many companies are still at odds on how and where to start.
In this article, we look at what businesses need to look out for, when it comes to AI development and team augmentation. However, we specifically assess these factors from the lens of software development in Sri Lanka, and how offshore teams from across the island can deliver quality and punctuality that is unmatched.
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The IT workforce of Sri Lanka comprises not only veteran engineers, but many who have domain-level expertise for various industries and niches. However, other specialists abound of the same calibre; software testers, UI/UX designers and even marketers, many of whom have specialist experience with IT products and services.
Already have a software engineering team, but need some leverage? Many software development companies in Sri Lanka can offer team augmentation services where only a specialist team member is added for the short-term needs of your project. But this needs to meet certain criteria – which brings us to our next point.
To qualify as a team augmentation service provider, a software offshoring company needs to:
Unlike traditional software offshoring models, a team augmentation model needs a specific cadence – something you need to make sure is available with your software outsourcing partner of choice, be it in Sri Lanka or elsewhere.
Software offshoring companies in Sri Lanka also have the domain expertise to undertake compliance-related operations surrounding your AI project; the high level of specialist knowledge harboured by the country’s IT workforce makes this possible. While ethics is a mandatory obligation for any organisation utilising AI, compliance requirements can differ depending on the industry or region your business operates in. This becomes more complex if your organisation is multinational.
But augmenting your existing software engineering teams with the right professionals who can guide you is a wise step forward to establish the right foundation for regulatory obligations. Although AI ethics and compliance professionals may be harder to source, most leading software outsourcing companies in Sri Lanka can source one on your behalf (if they don’t have someone already available on standby).
Whether you are a large and established organisation, or you are building dedicated development teams for startups via your software outsourcing partner, implementing robust protection for your endpoints, networks and databases is highly crucial.
With AI, the stakes get higher. As confidential customer and proprietary data is used by language models and AI agents to generate responses, predict outcomes and automate tasks, data protection becomes a sensitive undertaking that needs suitable security mechanisms in place.
Any AI project cannot be executed without cyber security and constant monitoring. As a result, your software outsourcing partner needs to either have in-house cyber security expertise, or be partnered with a reliable service provider for the very same.
Being one of the best IT companies in Sri Lanka, EFutures has extensive and long-standing experience with the industry of tech. As new technologies and trends fluctuate, our teams have been on the forefront, absorbing new skills and staying in lockstep.
Beginning with software offshoring and now having expanded towards AI development, here are our top tips for starting your AI project.
Before you embark on any kind of AI development, a thorough assessment of your current business situation is needed. This is so teams can gauge the scope of your project, and better understand the commitment required in order to hit the benchmarks you may have in mind.
How you approach this assessment varies, depending on whether your AI project is completely new, or an existing one.
Considering the high propensity of AI projects to hit a standstill even after launch, it is most recommended to release a beta version. Retain your existing systems as they are, so your teams always have access to them for conducting their day-to-day tasks.
Parallely implementing a beta version of your AI project can enable teams to use it while keeping an expectation of possible errors in mind. This will also encourage testing in real-life, high-pressure environments – thereby prompting engineering teams to collect error reports and improve on the beta, for an updated version.
Additionally, the beta can incorporate only the most necessary of features. This will also turn your first launch into an MVP – something your engineering teams can gauge to identify which features users prefer, so only those are capitalised on in terms of effort, budgets and time.
At this point, your AI project should be established to undertake the incorporation of new features, while fixing any errors that have been identified by users. Starting small is still advised, as it enables both engineers and users to gauge the usefulness of a new feature, and then decide whether they wish to expand and/or maintain it.
AI and its subset technologies are always changing. As new language models enter the space, older ones are retired or existing ones improve, your software outsourcing team will always have newer and/or updated models to work with. Always having your AI tools in beta mode will certainly help for this, as it can function as a sandbox of sorts – but with end users also playing with it for assessing end results.
AI team augmentation is now gradually gaining popularity, as it incorporates a faster time-to-hire for sourcing subject matter experts – but without the hassle of long-term contractual obligations.
This means that existing software development teams can gain the guidance they need (be it when implementing a new set of capabilities or for fixing any issues that plague the project) with little downtime. For businesses, this means that they can receive expert assistance as and when required, without having to retain the augmented team member for an extended period of time that’s otherwise conducive to more conventional contracts.
While being more flexible than traditional offshoring models, businesses still need to ensure their software outsourcing partner has the expertise they truly need, together with other nuances such as security and compliance. A track record and cadence of successful AI team augmentation isn’t a must, but definitely adds to their reliability quotient.
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