Services - Fractional AI engineer

For orgs

Most orgs see a tonne of value in AI but don't know how to develop an AI strategy, right-size the first use case, build and deploy for scale. It's easy to do POCs but hard to build a production grade solution that scales. You need AI engineers for that and hiring them is hard. First, it's a hot market. Second, it's hard to hire well without existing in-house technical capacity. Third, early stage orgs need a broad spectrum of skills - from data engineers to sort out their data systems, to data scientists to build models, to DevOps / full stack engineers to develop and deploy solutions. It is hard to find it all in one person. Instead you can get an engineer from IDinsight - the profile of the engineers adapts on what the org needs at that moment.

For engineers

Being the only AI engineer can be very hard (as someone who has been one). It is a lonely job with little mentorship and peer learning. For junior engineers, it is hard to develop best practices, define roles, and define strategy, The answer is to hire a senior leader first but all the problems with finding talent listed above are amplified. IDinsight can provide those.

For philanthropies

Talent is often the barrier to trying ideas quickly, iterating, and scaling. Philanthropies can help reduce this friction by providing their grantees with AI engineers to get them started or to accelerate their roadmap. In the long term, this will also help grantees build internal capacity, adopt best practices, and learn from other orgs. Philanthropies would also gain deeper insight into how various orgs are scaling AI use cases. They can invest in products and services that are cross-cutting that grow the ecosystem and reduce duplication.

We'll be adapting IDinsight's internal assets around processes and best practices for other orgs. We expect the margin cost of the fractional DS program to reduce over time as we create more of these reusable assets.

Why IDinsight

Our engineers are in the regions we work so they deeply understand context and culture. We also have built a number of solutions for NGOs, and as an NGO ourselves, we understand the constraints orgs work under. Finally, we have sectoral experts. We are not just a technology vendor; we can deeply engage on the problem from an impact perspective.