Akamai, the cybersecurity and cloud computing company that powers and protects business online, today said it is experiencing a surge in demand for Akamai Inference Cloud, a week after its official debut on stage at the NVIDIA® GTC Conference in Washington, DC.
The strong early interest points to how fast organizations are moving from experimentation to execution and underscores growing demand for platforms that make it easier to operationalize AI in real-world environments. Organizations across industries are testing the purpose-built platform in production and expanding into new use cases in video, personalization, customer support, and consumer products.
“It’s exciting to see the interest in Akamai Inference Cloud, but it isn’t surprising,” said Adam Karon, Chief Operating Officer and General Manager, Cloud Technology Group, Akamai. “Bringing pre-trained models together with dynamic, real-world context to deliver decisions in real time is the future of AI. And that future – distributing inference to the edge – is where Akamai shines.”
Akamai says examples of current use cases include:
- 8K video workflows. Harmonic is using Akamai Inference Cloud to deliver ultra-high resolution, multi-language video.
- Live video intelligence. Monks is using Akamai Inference Cloud to get the best shots from real-time multi-cam feeds.
- Recommendation engines. Akamai is working with a number of name-brand global retailers to help AI agent activities to personalize product recommendations.
- Assistive agents. Akamai is working with one of the world’s largest gaming companies to help enable context-aware chatbots across game modalities.
- AI-powered fit rooms. Akamai is working with mobile shopping companies to use AI inference to enable user controlled fitting room experiences with local photo and video.
- AI-powered toys. Akamai is working with one of the world’s largest toy makers to develop toys that learn, adapt, and interact.
“Live sports production requires processing at the edge – there’s simply no time for roundtrips to centralized data centers. Akamai Inference Cloud enables us to transcode 8K multi-camera feeds, process virtual reality content, and generate AI-powered play summaries in real-time, right at the edge,” said Lewis Smithingham, EVP of Strategic Industries, Monks. “This enables us to use cards designed for video, with native 4:2:2 support. With Akamai Inference Cloud, we will accelerate the delivery of key capabilities, including identifying players and plays and delivering tactical insights to coaches while the game is still happening. That’s only possible by distributing advanced GPUs to the edge, and it will transform how we approach sports broadcasting and immersive fan experiences.”
“Personalizing live streams demands intelligence to be deployed closer to the user,” said Gil Rudge, Senior Vice President, Solutions and Americas Sales, Harmonic. “Using Akamai’s massive cloud infrastructure to run NVIDIA Blackwell cards at the edge is a game changer for AI-powered video innovation. Akamai Inference Cloud will allow us to run AI models locally, expanding the number of functions we can deliver cost-effectively within the same compute instance for faster response times, sophisticated personalization and more enriched video content.”
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