How to Integrate AI into an App: Methods and Alternatives
Nowadays, it seems like every tech company in the market is striving to integrate artificial intelligence into their apps.
While some companies have already released AI features - examples are Notion, ClickUp, HubSpot, and Salesforce - the sheer majority is still exploring how to integrate AI into their internal and external applications.
Overall, this gives us a clear idea of what’s coming: Integrating AI into apps is no longer a side quest, but a priority that will be present in most tech product roadmaps in 2024.
In this article, we’ll explore methods, alternatives, and examples of how to integrate AI into an app, and also define what AI integrations are.
What are AI integrations?
AI integrations refer to software connections that send data from AI applications to other apps and vice versa.
These integrations help apps work together and provide apps with artificial intelligence capabilities like natural language processing and computer vision to fulfill actions, tasks, and processes.
Most AI integrations are powered by application programming interfaces (APIs), which in turn are developed by the companies offering AI apps.
Examples of AI integrations
There are multiple examples of AI integrations as the number of use cases keeps growing every day.
In fact, we’ve already released several tutorials showing how to integrate AI apps with other apps to automate key tasks and processes, such as:
On top of these, there are plenty of other Make-powered AI integrations that are readily available as templates - and that also serve us as examples for this section.
For instance, by integrating Google Natural Language (one of Google’s AI apps) with Google Sheets, you can automatically analyze text on the spot:
Another example would be to integrate ChatGPT and Telegram. By doing so, you’d be able to have a bot that automatically replies to Telegram messages in just a couple of seconds.
Methods to integrate AI into an app
Broadly speaking, there are two main methods to integrate artificial intelligence into an application:
Code through one or more APIs to integrate one or more apps.
Use a third-party platform like Make to build and deploy the integrations.
On top of this, companies who build their own AI features (such as Notion) might skip the use of APIs altogether when integrating these features into their platforms, and go for a traditional code-based approach instead.
How to integrate AI into an app: Basic steps
As with most challenges, integrating AI into an app starts by defining the problem the integrations will solve.
So, the first step is to define the use case for the AI integration.
As we showed above in the examples section, this can be virtually anything: From summarizing text and providing answers to categorizing information and recognizing images.
Once the use case for the integration has been defined, it’s time to check whether the necessary data is available.
For example, if you want to create an integration to automatically create product descriptions, you’ll need to check that there are some basic product characteristics available instead of a list of SKUs.
The third step is to make sure that you have all the necessary pieces to build the integrations.
More often than not, this includes items like subscriptions to other apps that need to be integrated, API tokens, and so on.
At this point, you’re ready to move on to the fourth step: Choosing the integration method.
Driven by variables like technical capabilities, financials, and time-to-deployment, you’ll likely be picking between a code-first and a no-code approach, and developing it in-house or externally.
And of course, this will lead you to the fifth step of the process: Building, testing, and deploying the integration.
Final words: It’s easier than it sounds
Thanks to platforms like Make, building integrations is something that anyone - tech background or not - can do.
If you still feel like you’re not up for the challenge, a good place to start is the Make Academy.
In there, you’ll find free courses that will show you how to build integrations from scratch, and before you know it, you’ll be doing it by yourself.
Register for a Make account, set aside a couple of hours of your time, and don’t let the momentum pass: Before you know it, you’ll be building AI integrations at the speed of your imagination!
