IT service provider NCS Australia is significantly expanding its AI workforce to stay ahead of the ramp-up in demand for AI solutions from clients. NCS Australia practice lead for data and AI Kevin Wilson said to ARN the provider has "committed to having 1,000 people enabled to use AI-powered solutions and services with 250 AI practitioners". Across the Asia Pacific region, NCS has also set the ambition to have 13,000 AI-enabled workers, with 300 AI leaders and "3,000" AI practitioners "by 2025", said Wilson. According to David Rosengrave, NCS Australia's national sales lead for AWS and Databricks, the IT service provider was on the path to hitting those numbers. "We're well and truly on the path today," he said. "We've got a number already trained. Our AI practitioners will be trained in technology such as Databricks." NCS Australia said the investment follows an increase in clients wanting to move beyond AI and machine learning experimentation. Data frustrations However, organisations face challenges moving to production-ready solutions because of data quality and integration issues. "Even though there's a lot of hype and experimentation, we're still seeing that many organisations struggle to take these experiments and turn them into production-ready solutions that actually deliver value," Wilson said. "Clients want to explore how to be more innovative, especially when using artificial intelligence for customer experience." According to Wilson, these clients are hindered by the issue of the quality of the data and the trust in it. "Now, organisations have even more source systems and they also want to integrate external systems, which is crucial for machine learning and AI," he said. "The challenge lies in enriching organisational data with external data to gain deeper insights." Rosengrave said getting the data component right is crucial for innovation however there also needs to be a focus on governance, security and ethical considerations. “Data quality initiatives can be expensive and take time,” he said. "A lot of it comes down to organisational and cultural issues, like operating models and processes.” Critical questions NCS are actively discussing with customers are centered around how models produce high-quality results. They also want to know what biases exist, and how can the model can be monitored and checked for them, Wilson added.