The small developer team-focused cloud infrastructure provider DigitalOcean Holdings Inc. has become the latest company to embrace the agentic AI trend, launching a new GenAI Platform that enables teams to build and deploy AI agents in a matter of minutes.
AI agents are one of the hottest trends in the artificial intelligence industry today, referring to generative AI models that can autonomously perform actions on behalf of human users and make complex decisions or analysis with minimal supervision. AI agents can learn new things over time, enabling them to perform progressively better as they become more experienced.
The potential of agentic AI is huge, and although it may take many years before we come to realize the full extent of what it’s capable of, DigitalOcean has identified it as a key battleground for cloud infrastructure providers.
The company is a rival to public cloud giants like Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp., offering a competing cloud infrastructure-as-a-service platform. But rather than take on those giants directly, it has carved out a niche for itself, focusing on small businesses with its “developer cloud” that makes life simpler for individual developers.
It sets itself apart with a streamlined interface and competitive prices, touting a user-friendly experience that’s focused on speed of deployment. Its serverless infrastructure makes it possible to deploy an application in production with just a few simple clicks, in-line with its goal of keeping cloud computing simple.
DigitalOcean believes that building AI agents should be simple too, and it says its new GenAI platform can help developers to get one up and running without any specialist skills in AI or machine learning.
Bratin Saha, DigitalOcean’s chief product and technology officer, announced the GenAI platform at the company’s annual customer conference Deploy, where he explained that it’s all about making AI agents accessible to smaller companies. “Generative AI is a challenging concept, but our team has worked tirelessly to create an easy-to-use platform that seamlessly integrates with our customers’ existing infrastructure and has a low barrier to entry for developers at any experience level.”
To simplify things, it provides a blueprint for creating AI agents, where users simply select from a library of powerful foundation models specialized in tasks such as document analysis, image generation and semantic search. Then they connect it to proprietary or public datasets and, to all intents and purposes, it should be good to go. All of this can be performed using an AI chatbot interface, where users simply describe what they’re trying to build.
The company explains that it uses “function calling” to connect the AI agents to the user’s database or application programming interface to ensure they can access the most accurate and up-to-date data available. It also provides guardrails to ensure safety and reliability, minimizing the risk of inaccurate, unreliable or inappropriate responses. Support for private endpoints is also available.
In addition, DigitalOcean stressed the “framework-agnostic” nature of its GenAI platform, which supports a seamless transition from AI agent creation to deployment. Customers will also be able to take advantage of the company’s popular “GPU Droplets“, which are virtual machines powered by Nvidia Corp.’s popular H100 graphics processing units. Launched last year, these are available in flexible single- and multi-node configurations, specifically to support AI workloads.
The no-code capabilities provided by DigitalOcean can help to make the GenAI Platform a compelling choice for developers, at a time when every cloud infrastructure company is rushing to support AI agent development, said Constellation Research Inc.’s vice president and principal analyst Andy Thurai.
“It promises to help developers build and deploy their AI agents as quickly as any other platform, if not faster,” he said.
The analyst said DigitalOcean’s main proposition appears to be customized AI agents that can tap into specific context and language- and customer-specific data, although they will probably be limited to fairly simple workflows.
“It will be much harder to build complex workflows, but the platform can be useful for developers with limited AI and machine learning knowledge,” Thurai added. “They’ll also be able to take advantage of the GPU Droplets, which enable users to size their GPU infrastructure based on task usage, and also support the use of more optimized LLMs.”
The industrial automation firm Autonoma Inc. was lucky enough to gain early access to DigitalOcean’s GenAI Platform, using it to build and deploy an AI agent that can create and manage large volumes of documents for each of its customers.
“We were able to quickly create intelligent AI agents that understand each customer’s specific context and language,” explained Autonoma Managing Director Florian Bauernfeind. “It makes it easier for us to read through pages of documentation and search through a variety of content.”
The company said its GenAI Platform has been up and running in beta since last year, and is now being made generally available to all customers from today. But although it’s now available, it’s far from being the finished article.
DigitalOcean said it’s planning to progressively enhance the platform’s capabilities, with support for URLs as a data source, agent evaluations, continuous integration and deployment pipelines, auto-indexing of knowledge bases, and model fine-tuning some of the features on its product roadmap.
Image: News/Meta AI
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