How to Scale AI at the Edge

Deploying AI at the edge is no longer limited to organisations with vast engineering teams and multimillion-pound budgets. In this episode, Nick Earle speaks with Neil Cresswell, Co-founder and CEO of Portainer, about how containerisation is making it easier to distribute, update and govern software across fleets of connected devices. 

Neil explains why containers are well suited to IoT environments, where devices may be numerous, geographically dispersed and intermittently connected. The conversation explores the technical realities of running applications and AI inference at the edge, the operational challenge of maintaining consistency at scale, and the value of solving one measurable problem before attempting a wholesale transformation. 

From AI-enabled agriculture and production-line monitoring to the detection of unexploded ordnance in potato processing, the episode shows how edge intelligence can turn previously impractical ideas into deployable use cases.