December 4, 2024

Let me start by asking you a really simple question: “What is artificial intelligence?” I guess that you all have answered that ‘AI is a technology that helps machines mimic human intelligence, decision-making, and problem-solving.’ If so, you’re right!

Almost every one of you is familiar with the technology and might have seen the usage of artificial intelligence in the real world. These days, we have cars that drive themselves, thanks to AI. Tesla vehicles are one of the most common examples of self-driving cars with a driver-assistance system called Autopilot.

The usage of AI isn’t limited to cars; we have voice assistants like Alexa and platforms like Netflix that utilize AI to recommend shows based on our preferences. And it is just the start of AI doing wonders. Honestly, it’s not wrong to say that there will be nothing artificial intelligence can’t do in the near future. 

Organizations have realized that they need to invest in AI development services to stay relevant in a highly competitive world. The reasons for AI adoption may vary from business to business—some may want to increase sales, work more efficiently, or make customers love them even more.

Understanding the numerous benefits of AI technology, businesses are looking for AI app development. According to a report by Market.us, the global AI in mobile apps market size was $16.7 billion in 2023 and is expected to be worth $249.8 billion by 2033.

But the tricky part is, ‘How to build an AI app from scratch for your business?’ To help you find your answers, I’ve put together this article. You can follow this step-by-step guide to create your own AI app from scratch.

3 Top Business Benefits of Building an AI App in 2025

Before answering the question you’re curious to know ‘How to develop AI applications?’, I want you to understand the “why” behind AI app development. It will help you set realistic goals and create applications that add value to your business. Here are 3 top benefits of building an AI app:

1: Increase Profitability

Every business owner is eyeing more profitability. What if I tell you that developing an AI app can help with the cause? Yes, it’s true! AI applications help businesses improve profitability in a ton of ways.

We all know that extensive human labor is necessary to carry out various processes within an organization. These processes include data entry, customer services, and marketing tasks. Human labor needs wages for their hard work. Moreover, human work isn’t always error-free. These errors can be costly for businesses. 

However, AI applications help businesses automate various operational tasks. With automation, there is little to no chance of errors, and it requires just a few human resources to oversee all the tasks. That’s one way of increasing profitability.

Another way is to understand customer demands and grab opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling to increase sales. More sales bring in more cash, and more cash means higher profits.

2: Personalize Customer Experiences

Customers love personalized experiences. AI applications analyze user behavior and preferences to provide suggestions and recommendations to improve customer engagement and experience. Several reports have found the role of AI in enhancing customer experiences.

Don’t you love it when your favorite mobile apps recommend products by understanding your preferences? Personally, I love it when apps like Netflix suggest thriller movies to me after analyzing my search history and previously watched series.

3: Data-Driven Decision-Making

Jeff Weiner, an American businessman and former CEO of LinkedIn, said, ‘Data really powers everything that we do.’ And think of it for a second: isn’t it true?

A survey by Harvard Business Review found that data-driven companies make more profit than those that don’t. Out of 366 executives surveyed, 91% believe that making data and analytics accessible to everyone within their organization is crucial for the organization’s success.

Think of it this way: your organization generates a lot of data. Is this data of any use? Probably not! But AI is the solution you need to turn this raw data into actionable insights. All you need to do now is build an AI application and start making data-driven decisions.

How to Build an AI App in 2025—8 Simple Steps to Follow

Now, without making you wait any longer, I will help you understand how to build an AI app from scratch by following eight simple steps. Business owners and tech enthusiasts curious about creating an artificial intelligence app for themselves must follow these steps:

Step 1: Define what you want your app to solve

Before you proceed to the actual process of AI app development, it is important to have a clear vision in mind. This means you must know who your audience is and what they want.

Once identified, you must understand what problem your app will solve, as well as its functionality and features. During the planning phase, you have to set SMART goals and KPIs to measure the success of your AI application. A lot of people skip this step and end up failing.

Step 2: Collect & Prepare Data

By now, I have said multiple times how much data matters to emphasize its importance when creating your own AI application. You can call data the lifeblood of your AI application. According to SnapLogic, 72% of 500 IT decision-makers report a negative impact on customer engagement and satisfaction due to poor data quality.

Collecting and preparing data is one of the most important steps in developing an AI app that requires your time and effort. You must clean and preprocess the data to ensure it is of the highest quality, which will directly impact the accuracy of your AI model. 

AI applications work on a simple principle: “Garbage in, garbage out.” This means that if your data is inaccurate and biased, the outcomes you receive will be inaccurate.

Step 3: Choose the Right Tech Stack & Tools

In order to ensure the success of your AI application, you must choose the right tech stack. Before choosing the tools and frameworks for building an AI app, you must access your current IT infrastructure. Why is it so? To avoid any integration problems.

Here is a detailed list of tools and technologies that you can use to create an AI app from scratch:

Top Tools and Technologies to create an AI app from scratch

Step 4: Train AI Model

After collecting and cleaning your AI data, it’s time to train your AI model. The three core types of machine learning to train your AI model are:

• Supervised learning: Use labeled data to train models. It is best for tasks like facial recognition or weather forecasting.
• Unsupervised learning: Identify hidden patterns in data. It is most suitable for clustering or anomaly detection.
• Reinforcement learning: Teach models decision-making by rewarding actions. It is ideal for robotics and gaming.

Once done with the type of training, you need to design the architecture of your AI model:

• Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs): Excels in image and video recognition by identifying features despite noise.
• Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs): Perfect for sequential data like time series or natural language processing.
• Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs): Creates realistic data that is useful for image generation and video enhancement.

Here, it is important for you to understand that the choice of a training method and the architecture depends on your specific needs!

You feed large datasets to the model, adjust parameters during the validation phase, and use cross-validation techniques to ensure the high performance of the AI model. It is best to split your data. Use 70% of your data for training, 15% for validation, and 15% for testing to optimize and evaluate your model.

Step 5: Develop the Application

This is the phase where you will create your application without integrating AI into it. Top AI consulting firms that offer a full range of AI development services build the front-end and back-end of the application with high precision. 

The front end should be user-friendly and easy to navigate. During this phase, it is necessary to set up the database to manage data. The back-end should be secure and about integrating various server-side components.

Step 6: Integrate the AI Model into the App

Now, it’s time to turn your simple application into an AI application by integrating an AI model. This is one of the crucial steps that can make or break the AI application. It will enhance the capabilities of your existing application. 

However, here’s the tricky part: deciding whether to include the AI model in your front-end or back-end. Adding it to the front end means direct interaction with the end users, or you might want to add it to the back end.

To make things easier for you, I want to add that it’s not necessary to start from zero if you have AI APIs available. These already available APIs will save a ton of development time. For example, Google Cloud Vision API offers powerful image analysis features you can plug right into your app.

Step 7: Model Testing and Iteration

Before deploying your app for the audience, it is necessary to test your AI application’s features and functionality. You can do this by releasing it to a specific group of people. It will help you understand shortcomings—maybe in the front end or back end.

A lot of testing methods are available to ensure optimal performance and reliability of the artificial intelligence application. These include unit testing, integration testing, user acceptance testing, and security testing. Once done, your app is ready to win the hearts of millions of users!

Step 8: Deploy & Monitor

After completing the development and testing processes, it is time for your app to go live. Deploy your AI application on your preferred channels, including web, Android, and iOS. 

You can make the deployment process smooth by following the best deployment practices, including the use of CI/CD pipelines and containerization.

The AI app development process doesn’t end with deployment; you must keep an eye on user feedback and continuously monitor app performance to ensure its accuracy and reliability over time.

Challenges You Might Face When Building an AI Application

Even if you had any second thoughts about AI app development, they might be gone at this point. However, it is important to know that you might face several challenges when considering how to develop an AI application from scratch. Knowing about these challenges beforehand will help you navigate them easily. These challenges are:

1: Data Quality

Challenge:

The accuracy of AI models and applications depends on the training data. The more accurate the training data, the better the predictions and performance. It is essential to ensure that the training data is of the highest quality. By highest quality, I mean it should be complete, accurate, and unbiased.

Solution:

Pay attention to the process of data collection and preprocessing to ensure it’s clean, accurate, and complete.

2: Security and Privacy Concerns

Challenge:

AI applications handle sensitive data, and with data breaches at an all-time high, it’s important for organizations to protect the privacy and security of their business data.

Solution:

Overcoming this issue requires you to implement strict security measures and adhere to international regulations like HIPAA to protect your sensitive data.

3: Integration with Existing Systems

Challenge:

Integrating with your existing systems isn’t easy. It requires skill and can lead to compatibility issues.

Solution:

Design your AI components to be scalable and modular. Test and validate the system to avoid compatibility issues.

4: AI Expertise

Challenge:

Building an AI application requires you to have AI skills. You must be familiar with AI tools and frameworks to create a secure and scalable solution.

Solution:

You can either acquire AI development skills or hire a dedicated AI development team to get the job done for you.

What are my options if I’m not skilled enough to make an AI app on my own?

By now, you might have understood that building your own AI application from scratch isn’t for everyone. It is important to have programming, problem-solving, and domain knowledge to master AI application development. So, what’s next for you?

You’ve probably seen in movies that it’s smart to have a backup plan. Well, when it comes to building an AI application, the backup plan is to hire one of the top machine learning consulting companies. And that’s exactly what you need to do. 

These ML companies have proven expertise, a portfolio of AI solutions, and top talent from around the globe dedicated to the success of their clients. With these companies by your side, you don’t have to worry about time differences, as they work according to your schedule and keep you in the communication loop to ensure you’re on the same page.

How are industries using AI app development to their advantage?

We’re at the point where the better question is which industries haven’t been touched by AI. Pretty much every industry can benefit by using AI applications. Let’s explore how some industries are using AI applications to their advantage:

1: Healthcare

Healthcare is one of the sectors that is increasingly shifting towards AI-powered applications. AI apps help healthcare providers to monitor patients’ vital signs using wearable AI technologies.

Today, we see the use of AI in healthcare to diagnose diseases. That’s not all; healthcare organizations use AI for medical imaging to monitor tumors and the spread of other life-threatening diseases quickly. It helps healthcare providers to take early actions to prevent any unfortunate situations.

2: Finance

AI applications are helping finance institutions to reimagine traditional methods and embrace the future. Several notable machine learning consulting firms deliver AI applications using machine learning algorithms. These applications analyze historical transactional data to flag suspicious activities and prevent fraud. 

Apart from fraud prevention, AI applications improve credit scoring by looking at a wide range of data and providing tailored financial advice by analyzing your budget and preferences.

3: Manufacturing

Wherever you find AI, you will find efficiency and better decision-making, and nothing changes for the manufacturing industry. AI in manufacturing helps with supply chain management. It helps businesses optimize inventory management and forecast demand using predictive analytics. 

What’s more, creating an AI application will help with the predictive maintenance of equipment. It means businesses can fix equipment problems before they even happen and keep processes running smoothly.

Before moving on, I want to clarify that these are not the only use cases of AI in these industries, and these are not the only industries where AI is used. The list of industries is so long that we could write a dedicated article on it.

Your Favorite Apps Using AI

Will you be surprised to know that some of the apps you have on your mobile use AI? Let’s explore some of your favorite apps that you are using without even knowing:

1: Snapchat

Pretty much all of you have probably used Snapchat at least once. I know it’s more of a thing for the younger crowd, but I’m sure you’ve heard about it. 

Snapchat is a social media platform for clicking photos, shooting videos, and sending them to your friends. Snapchat has done things differently to attract a larger, younger audience. They have added all those awesome, goofy filters everyone loves. You can turn into your favorite superhero or a puppy using its AI-powered facial recognition feature.

2: Instagram

I have decided to add another social media application to enhance your understanding that AI is everywhere, even in the apps we use on a daily basis. 

Instagram is all about sharing photos and videos, and AI is the brain behind it all. Have you ever noticed that your feed and Explore page are always filled with videos and pictures you love to search for and watch? Ever wondered why? That’s AI in action!

3: ChatGpt

ChatGPT is like having a super-smart buddy to chat with anytime. It uses AI to understand your questions and give detailed, human-like responses. Whether you need help writing, brainstorming ideas, or just having a conversation, it’s got you covered.

4: Alexa

Alexa is developed by Amazon and is an AI virtual assistant. It is like an employee who listens to your orders and does everything you say without making mistakes. It listens to your voice commands and does anything you want it to do, like playing your favorite music or even ordering something for you.

5: Google Maps

Google Maps is another AI application that I use every time I need to find a restaurant near me or visit a place for the first time. It uses AI to provide necessary information about the fastest route to reach the destination and traffic jams. Google Maps helps you and me keep from getting lost and makes navigation easy.

How much does AI app development cost in 2025?

If you’re thinking of investing in AI app development, this might be the most important answer you want to know. Just so you know, developing a basic AI app will cost you around $15,000. But, if you’re planning to create an AI app with advanced features and modern technologies, it can cost you $200,000—it could be a little under or over.

How much does AI app development cost

Conclusion

In this highly competitive business landscape, where you never know when a smart move by your competitor could make you obsolete, it is essential to outthink them and develop an AI application. 

Building an AI app offers countless benefits for your business, no matter the industry. Hundreds of AI apps are available, and you and I both have ones we love to use. So why not build one for your own business and grow your audience? 

I have tried to decipher everything you need to know about how to build an AI app with this step-by-step guide. In the end, I want to say that AI app development isn’t just something nice to have—it’s a must if you want to stay in the game. 

Why Choose Xeven Solutions to Build Your Next AI Application

The AI app development partner you choose can make all the difference. Xeven Solutions is a leading AI development company recommended by global businesses. The reasons for this are obvious: world-class talent, open communication, client-centric approach, and no hidden charges. 

Our 200+ veteran engineers work hand-in-hand with you to make sure you achieve what you’re after. Once done with the requirement-gathering phase, we develop and deploy AI applications that are user-friendly and scalable.

We’re proud of living up to the expectations of our clients—be it improving customer satisfaction, optimizing workflows, or driving profits with custom AI solutions built just for them.

Want to learn more? Get in touch with our AI experts and learn how Xeven Solutions doesn’t just help you build an AI app—we empower you to meet your goals faster and smarter.

About the Author: Taimoor Asghar

Taimoor Asghar is a Technical Content Writer with a passion for emerging technologies, continuously keeping himself updated with the latest industry and technological trends. He ensures that complex concepts are translated into informative pieces, catering to both experts and novices. He crafts engaging narratives through blogs, articles, and how-to guides that captivate audiences and inspire them to delve deeper into the ever-evolving world of tech innovation.