Introducing CansoAI – Build ML Systems 10x Faster & Cheaper

We are excited to introduce Canso, a platform to help ML teams accelerate feature authoring, orchestration, deployment and monitoring, through a no-low code approach. This is our first step towards a larger vision of simplifying ML decisioning and development.

ML teams, working on complex systems like fraud detection, recommendation systems are often found either struggling with engineering tasks such as feature engineering, orchestration, achieving sub-second latency, monitoring alerts etc. or dependent on engineering function for the same. In between all this, more important initiatives around model performance improvement that bring the most value takes a back seat.

In our experience of working with several companies ranging from early stage startups to large enterprises, we noticed a common problem that these tasks take up more than 60-70% of the time and cost that goes into any ML project. This significantly reduces the speed of experimentation and delays value creation. For e.g. It can easily take a whole quarter for a small ML team working on real-time fraud detection to upgrade the model with a feature based on a new hypothesis. There are several feature platforms available but due to piecemeal nature of the product, high cost and not having quality support, numerous smaller companies are unable to get the right value.

Canso solves this problem by providing a seamless design abstracting away complex data engineering workflows, a team of experts to help you with ML systems whenever required and making all this available at an affordable cost. Some of the features available in MVP:

Define & Deploy Features in Minutes – 

1. Declarative framework to help Data scientists author features using a no-code approach..
2. No need to write Airflow DAGs; Canso supports managed orchestration.
3. One-click dry run & deployment

Integrations with your existing observability suite –

1. Canso comes integrated with Grafana, Prometheus, Loki and Slack
2. Built-in visualizations of health KPIs for your pipelines and services
3. Automatic slack alerts for the owners of features and services

Feature Discovery & Management –  

1. A Feature registry to help teams discover and use features easily
2. Easily create derived features by using existing ones saving hours of effort

With Canso, Data Scientists & Engineers can easily get features/rules in production in minutes which otherwise is weeks of effort. This not only reduces ML cost by 40-50%, but also unlocks accelerated experimentation. Teams can conduct 10-12 experiments in a year, compared to 3-4 earlier. In use cases like fraud detection where there is constant battle to combat new types of fraud, it is crucial for the companies to boost experimentation speed to avoid losses.
To try out Canso, please visit our website https://www.canso.ai. There is a seamless onboarding flow to get you started in under 30 mins. And you get 1 month free access to test various features.

Canso AI Platform – What’s next?

Canso is working on a much larger initiative to solve the complex decisioning processes that usually constitute the rest 50% of the time of Data Scientists and of Product owners as well. Right from identifying avenues for model improvements and validating the same to deploying and scaling it in production, there are several small to big decisions that are required to be made by tech and business teams that consume a lot of time. For e.g. In classification use cases, optimizing the trade-off between value and revenue loss due to false positives is a crucial component that causes inefficiencies.

We are working on building AI based features that can help both ML & product teams make decisions efficiently and improve model performance easily. Beta for such features will be released in coming months. If you are interested in knowing more and getting early access, please drop us a note here https://canso.ai/letstalk or join the Canso Slack community.

Open Source Release for K8 Cluster

In addition to the feature platform MVP, we’re pleased to open source a framework to easily spin up a Canso compatible K8 cluster. The framework contains Terraform scripts/modules to provision EKS (Kubernetes on AWS) clusters & related dependencies such as VPCs, Security groups, IAM roles, S3 buckets & RDS Databases. This is intended to provision infra as code in a standardized manner.

Please check the github repository here for more information.