How to Build an AI App in 2023: The Step-by-Step Guide

Artificial Intelligence is literally everywhere. The usage of AI is growing at a rapid pace, inspiring companies to invest in AI-enabled applications for their businesses. The global AI market size is estimated to boom at the compound annual growth rate of 19% from 2023 to 2032, encouraging premium companies like Google, Amazon and Apple to utilise AI in their processes to maximise their technical efficiencies. 

The striking popularity of AI is no secret. It can be derived from the fact that many organisations are keen to enhance the user experience by including AI-powered customer-centric automation in their business websites and apps. 

The current statistic shows that 58% of B2B and 42% of B2C companies use chatbots to lure customers’ interests. This encourages organisations to hire expert mobile app development companies to sync AI with their business app.  

With these facts and figures, there is no question that by leveraging AI in your current business app, you may open immense possibilities to ace your business and offer improved customer experience and services. 

Therefore, here we have come up with this article on AI app building with a step-by-step guide to provide you with all the necessary information for developing and automating the app functionalities to increase the efficiency and capabilities of your current business mobile app. 

In this article, you will get the answers to all your queries related to:

• What is AI in Mobile Apps?
• How do we use AI in Mobile Apps?
• How do we build an AI Application?
• Why Do You Need an AI Integrated Mobile App?
• Selection of AI Mobile App Building Agency  

So, without waiting anymore, let’s begin the learning.

What is AI (Artificial Intelligence) in Mobile Apps?

In 2023, AI is buzzing the app market. To bring innovative development to your mobile application, there’s nothing better than implementing the Artificial Intelligence mobile app development process. The AI integration uplifts the quality of your app by utilising machine learning abilities to respond to stimulations. 

The role of automation is to enhance the app’s efficiency and to expand user experience. The AI-powered apps benefit business analysts in understanding the users’ behaviour by profoundly analysing the inputs entered by them. AI can smartly gather user data like location, search history, contacts, and daily app activities and help frame potential customers’ purchasing parity.  

How Do We Use AI in Mobile Apps?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a collection of complex algorithms that use Machine Language (ML) to depict the user’s stimuli and analyse the usage patterns. AI can immensely help in performance acceleration by creating an in-depth analysis of user behaviour. 

Implementing AI in the business app purely depends upon the type of your business, the targeted audience, and the intrinsic requirements. Uber is one of the companies to clout its app with AI integration in 2019 and observe the visible benefits. The company uses AI functionalities in various forms like fraud detection, safety processes, risk assessment, matching drivers and rides, and route optimisation, among others. 

Uber’s customer service incidents are handled most efficiently by AI, which also helps the agents to satisfy customer queries seamlessly. With the 10% improvement in customer satisfaction and app efficiency, Uber is forecasting profitable ventures in investing more in AI and developing the AI-powered chatbot to integrate into the app to enhance user experience.   

You can conveniently hire a mobile app development company and develop an AI-affiliated app on any platform, whether iOS or Android; it will assist in leveling up your business by leveraging the best potentials and providing a serene user experience. 

There are two ways to use AI in your mobile app: integrate it into your existing application or develop an entirely new app driven by AI.

• Chatbots

Chatbot is one of the most widely used AI functions, significantly contributing to decreased operational expenses. It helps eliminate unnecessary staffing and provides instant 24/7 customer assistance in various manners, like providing answers to general queries, feedback form filling, etc. To implement these features effectively, businesses often collaborate with a chatbot development company.

• Speech Recognition

Many companies integrate speech/voice recognition and conversational AI concepts into their applications to provide customer convenience. Virtual assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, or Cortana use the AI-driven voice recognition system that converts human voice into machine language, which is easily understandable by computers.

• Image Recognition

Image recognition allows you to make online searches with the help of capturing and uploading an image of a particular product or person. The AI’s advanced features make it possible to produce the most accurate results using computer vision. It matches the uploaded image with the data warehouse and generates output within a few minutes. 

• Security Features

The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) announced a 13% increase in cyber threats in 2022 compared to the previous year. Hence, many companies have incorporated AI app authentication to curb this issue and to safeguard users from cyber attackers and hackers. Artificial Intelligence depicts the user’s behaviour and detects anomalous activities. It can quickly shut down the app functions and send alert notifications to the user via SMS or email. 

• Personalise Content

Personalisation is another apt feature of AI that lets the users experience filtered suggestions based on their previous usage and buying patterns. Many companies, like Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, etc., have adopted this feature in their app, providing a tranquil user experience to their customers.  

How to Build an AI Application

Building an AI app can be a complex and iterative process. However, careful planning and attention to detail at each step will lead to an impactful and successful solution. This 9-step process will help you build a functional AI app that can help transform your business.  Let’s explore the steps involved in building the AI app below:

Step 1: Define the Problem Area

Underline what exactly you expect from your AI app. Defining the problem at first will help you understand what features and functions you want in your AI app. Knowing the objective of the AI in your app is crucial for anticipating its success. When you see the problem areas, you can put your ideas into an actionable plan and get refined results.

Step 2: Gather Data

The AI-driven apps extensively depend upon the data to produce the desired results. Gathering a substantial volume of data is essential for the effective operation of your AI-powered application. Consequently, you must collect and prepare the necessary data for training and testing your AI model. High-quality data is crucial for providing the best results for your application.

Step 3: Select the Right Algorithm/Model

As per the defined app goals, select the right machine learning or deep learning algorithms that depict your project goals skillfully. This choice of algorithms widely depends on the nature of your data inputs and the problem you are trying to solve using the AI in your app. The algorithms/models are formed based on the learning type. There are two types of learning algorithms: 

• Supervised Learning – Supervised learning, commonly used for tasks like classification and regression, is a process where machine learning models learn from labelled data to make precise decisions. It involves data collection, pre-processing, model selection and training, evaluation, fine-tuning, deployment, and ongoing maintenance.
• Unsupervised Learning – Unsupervised learning is valuable when you have large datasets and want to cluster similar data points or reduce the dimensionality of your data without the need for labelled examples. It plays a crucial role in data exploration and feature engineering in many machine learning applications. 

Step 4: Training the Models

It is essential to train the models to verify the model’s accuracy. To ensure that the models work accurately within the pre-decided framework, training and retraining them until they achieve the desired threshold is crucial. Tweak hyperparameters and experiment with the different settings to optimise the performance. 

AI highly depends upon the data; therefore, experiment with diverse entries to ensure expected solutions. Train the models for image recognition using the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) algorithm. In contrast, use K Nearest Neighbours (KNN) or Support Vector Machine (SVM) machine language algorithms for the classification.

Step 5: Choose the Best Programing Language and Framework

Choose the best AI programming language and suitable technologies to execute a splendid user experience and develop an intuitive AI system. As per your project’s requirements, you must select the programming language from an array of languages available. 

Popular open-source languages available are Python and R, recommended by most mobile app development companies. Likewise, you also need to select the framework for your app from the various options available according to your app requirements. Some popular frameworks available are Keras, PyTorch, TensorFlow, or CNTK. 

Step 6: App Designing (UI/UX design)

Designing your app plays a crucial role as it leaves the first impression in the users’ minds. Incorporate a user-friendly interface for interacting with your AI application. Utilizing UI and UX design, you can elevate the visual aesthetics of your app, ensuring it delivers an exceptional user experience to your target audience. Furthermore, you can also improve the look and feel of the app and redo the navigation system to provide ease to your customers.  

Step 7: Start with the Development Process

Once every step is achieved, it’s time to start with the AI app development process. While going through the development process, ensure that the code passes all the quality testing and brings value to the users. Except for the CRISP-DM, the development process of AI-powered apps is similar to the other app development techniques. 

While developing an AI-driven app for your business, you must also implement robust security measures to protect the user’s data and your AI model from potential threats. You can also work on preparing the AI system to scale your infrastructure to handle the increased traffic and data. Optimise your AI algorithms and code for maximum efficiency.

Step 8: Testing and Deployment

After successfully developing your AI-powered application, start with the next phase of testing the app for Quality Assurance (QA). The QA engineers can test your app on various parameters using manual, automated, or mixed techniques. Access how well your app is performing on the validation and test datasets. 

The common evaluation metrics include accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and mean squared errors, depending on your app type. Ensure that the end product works per the set guidelines and provides the desired performance. After that, deploying the AI app into the production environment involves integrating it into the mobile app and other software systems. 

Step 9: Monitoring and Maintenance

Post-deployment, continuously monitor your AI app performance in the real-world environment. The post-sale customer support service plays a critical role here by detecting and addressing the issues promptly and keeping your model up to date by upgrading with available new datasets. Regular monitoring and maintenance after the app goes live also ensures fixing any problems related to app performance within the minimum time frame. 

Why Do You Need an AI Integrated Mobile App?

By integrating Artificial Intelligence into your mobile application, you can observe a higher user engagement, retention, and satisfaction rate. You can also automate several business processes and aim to double the ROI. 

The Worldwide Artificial Intelligence Spending Guide reports show increased investments in AI by Australian companies with a CAGR of 24.4% from 2020 to 2025. This is estimated as a 3.6 billion investment growth in 2025. 

 

Below are several reasons that explain why you need to incorporate or build an AI-driven mobile app for your business:

• Improved User Experience

AI can enhance the overall user experience by providing features like Natural Language Processing (NLP) for voice commands or chatbots for real-time assistance. This feature makes the app more useful and user-friendly.

• Boost App Value by Personalisation

AI can analyse user data and behaviour to deliver personalised content and recommendations. This makes the app very convenient and is expected to boost conversions. 

• Offer Predictive Analytics

AI can read, observe, and predict user behaviours and preferences, proactively allowing the app to offer suggestions and solutions. For example, eCommerce can predict user’s buying patterns and suggest similar recommendations.

• Increase Engagement by Automation

AI can automate repetitive tasks, such as data entry or content curation. This frees users to focus on more valuable activities and reduces manual efforts. 

• Enhanced Search Discovery

AI-powered search algorithms can provide more accurate and relevant search results, making it easier for users to find what they want within the application. 

Selection of AI Mobile App Building Agency  

AI app-building is a cumbersome project. Hence, hiring an expert AI mobile app development company that can handle your task efficiently and offer the most desired solutions with maximum capabilities is advisable. Therefore, here, we have compiled some essential points that you must check while contracting a proficient AI app-building partner for your project:

• Expertise and Experience – Evaluate the agency’s AI and machine learning expertise. Look for an agency with a proven track record and experience in your industry or domain. 
• Team Composition – You can also assess the qualifications and skills of the team members working on your project. Look for a team with diverse skills, including data scientists, software developers, machine learning engineers, and domain experts.
• Technological Stack – You must also ensure the agency is well-furnished with the up-to-date AI and machine learning technologies, frameworks, and tools required in your project.
• Data Privacy and Security – Enquire about the company’s data privacy and security protocols if your project requires the involvement of sensitive data and information.
• Project Management and Timeline – Understand the agency’s project management approach and its plan for project milestones, timelines, and deliverables. 
• Cost and Budget – Get a detailed project cost breakdown and ensure that it aligns with your pre-set budget. Be clear about what is included in the given pricing and whether it fulfills your AI app-building needs. 
• Support and Maintenance – Inquire about their plan for post-launch support and maintenance services, as the AI modules occasionally require post-deployment monitoring and maintenance. 

Conclusion

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning/deep learning have opened the doors of innovations and versatility to achieve new heights by mirroring human actions and Intelligence. The potential of AI can be utilised in various forms, like rendering customer satisfaction by delivering scalable and highly responsive AI-powered mobile applications. 

However, AI application building is a complex process, and it is viable to take the assistance of an expert mobile app development company that can offer you the end-to-end services of creating highly responsive and stunning AI-powered mobile applications for your business.