Aviation business that want to take advantage of Artificial Intelligence must build their own functionality rather than buy it in, delegate at Aerospace Tech Week heard this week.

Cormac Walsh, head of aerospace industry for Nordcloud, an IBM company, said the main reason all firms are moving to cloud computing is to take advantage of AI.

But he said AI is moving so fast, with new features being released on a daily basis, that third party products are quickly surpassed.

“Enterprises moved [to cloud computing] because they wanted to become digital, they wanted to improve their IT.

“One of the main drivers was that they wated to save money. That’s gone, those days are past. The strongest reason why enterprises are moving into the cloud right now is to take advantage of AI.

“But AI is moving at an incredible rate. Over the last two years you have seen new features released on a daily basis.

“If you want to be at the leading edge of the value curve you can get from AI you do not want to be buying AI products, you want to be enabling AI services within your company.

“What you need to have is an AI factory inserted into your organisation and that should be able to quickly spin up new capabilities based on the technology that’s being released daily.”

Walsh said AI products will ‘stay still’ as evolving technologies move past them and he said other sectors, like banking, are embracing this.

He said even if in-house developers create something that does not end up being used they have taken on skills they did not previously have which will be used on other use cases.

“This is the message in IBM. In the past we used to tell people buy it do not build it. In this respect we say build it do not buy it because the playground is moving so fast if you buy it you will be left behind.

“If you want to be this week, not last week you have to do it yourself and build these capabilities. Moving to the cloud is absolutely unavoidable.”

The key to building the in-house technical capabilities comes down to retention and talent offloading. “You do not necessarily want everyone to remain inside your company,” Walsh said.

“If you want to attract new fresh blood you are not going to be it with legacy IT systems, you will stand no chance.

“The people who will apply for the positions you have right now are the people who will develop the new systems we have not even thought about yet. To a degree it’s a survival instinct issue.”

Walsh added: “Businesses have the opportunity to become the agile company they always wanted to be; that devops company they always told their investors they wanted to be.”