The importance of Artificial Intelligence in your products and services is increasingly essential in 2021. As you already know, your AI modules are only as beneficial as their training data. The question is: how much should you spend on your AI training data?With an AI budget pumped into the development of AI modules, you are now at the point where it is crucial to exercise caution before investing in training datasets.That’s where we come in. Our experience working with hundreds of clients will give you the insights necessary to develop an effective budget for AI training data to translate to a significant ROI.Let’s get after it.How Much Data You Need?The data volume required directly reflects the price you will end up paying. A recent study by Dimensional Research discovered that organizations on average need close to 100,000 data samples for their AI modules to function effectively.
While volume is important, the data quality you feed into the system is of equal importance; data bias, low-quality datasets, lack of relevant annotated data, and other factors could cost you time, resources, and effort. 100,000 insignificant samples will eventually cost more than 200,000 samples of quality data.The amount of data you actually need for your system also depends on the use cases you have in hand. Effectively defining your issues will make clear whether you need image, text, speech/audio, or video data (and the volume of each).For example, if your company is focused primarily on computer vision, you will most likely need a combination of video and image data rather than audio and text. Or, if you plan to deploy chatbots on your eCommerce store, audio and text data are more relevant than video and image.Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all formula, package, or rule of thumb to calculate the price of AI training data or the quality required because the metrics are unique across different business and market segments. Calculating a budget is contextual; no two businesses will have the same AI training data needs.The Price of DataEconomists have recently declared that the price of data has surpassed the price of oil. If you visualize the generic concept of data as a market, and images, text, audio files, and videos as products are all priced out separately.Based on your AI requirements, use cases, and other determining factors, you would need to procure individual dataset types at respective prices. Also, each data type is valued at a different rate.To give you an idea of how datasets are priced, here’s a quick table.Data TypePricing StrategyImagePriced per single image fileVideoPriced per second, minute, an hour, or individual frameAudio / SpeechPriced per second, a minute, or hourTextPriced per word or sentence