Building Better AI Starts with Data: 5 Real-World Use Cases of Scale AI in 2025

Written By:
Founder & CTO
June 13, 2025

In 2025, enterprise AI no longer hinges solely on novel architectures or bigger models, it depends on data quality, scale, and speed. At the core of this shift lies one key truth: Better data builds better models.

That’s why the most advanced AI systems today, from autonomous vehicles to generative AI, are increasingly powered by Scale AI, the gold standard in enterprise data labeling and annotation. Whether you're an ML engineer fine-tuning an LLM or deploying edge-AI in a public safety system, Scale AI’s platform ensures you get accurate, secure, human-in-the-loop labeled data, right when you need it.

Let’s explore five real-world, enterprise-grade use cases where Scale AI is transforming how developers train and deploy world-class AI.

Autonomous Vehicles – Powering Perception with High-Fidelity Multimodal Labels

Autonomous vehicles rely on a vast amount of sensor data to interpret the environment and make split-second decisions. Lidar, radar, RGB cameras, GPS, IMUs, each stream must be fused, labeled, and learned from.

Challenges in AV data labeling
  • Multimodal complexity: Lidar produces 3D point clouds, video offers continuous vision, GPS provides geo-coordinates, each requires a distinct labeling method.

  • Edge-case detection: Construction zones, temporary signage, adverse weather, or rare road-user behaviors can't be generalized from standard datasets.

  • Scale: A single vehicle generates terabytes of data daily. Labeling even 10% of that manually is operationally unfeasible.
How Scale AI solves it

Scale AI offers autonomous vehicle labeling pipelines that combine pre-labeling via ML models, expert human review, and quality control audits. Labels include:

  • 3D bounding boxes for Lidar/RGB fusion

  • Semantic segmentation for road surfaces, curbs, signage

  • Instance tracking across frames for temporal understanding

  • Scenario classification, e.g., merging, overtaking, obstacle avoidance

Through its Scale Nucleus system, developers can inspect edge-case failure clusters, optimize model performance, and focus retraining efforts where it matters most.

AV Developer Workflow Example

An AV software engineer building a highway perception module can integrate Scale through an API. Their workflow might look like:

  1. Upload multi-sensor recordings from a fleet run

  2. Auto-tag sequences with pre-existing AV models

  3. Route high-risk/low-confidence segments to Scale AI

  4. Receive labeled datasets in structured formats like JSON or ROS bag

  5. Feed labeled sets into model retraining pipelines with TensorFlow or PyTorch

Healthcare Imaging – Building Diagnostic Models That Doctors Trust

In AI for healthcare, lives are literally on the line. Diagnostic accuracy, model interpretability, and regulatory compliance all begin with clinical-grade data labeling.

Why healthcare annotation is hard
  • Domain expertise required: Only trained radiologists or pathologists can distinguish between benign and malignant features.

  • Anatomical complexity: Human tissues, organs, and abnormalities often look similar across cases.

  • Compliance and security: HIPAA and other data privacy laws make general-purpose labeling tools unusable in clinical settings.

How Scale AI enables medical AI

Scale AI supports:

  • 2D and 3D annotation tools for DICOM images, MRIs, CT scans, and histopathology slides

  • Medical expert labeling workforce, including board-certified specialists

  • HIPAA-compliant environments, with full audit trails and PII redaction

  • Label ontologies matched to clinical taxonomies like SNOMED CT or ICD-10

Advanced QA protocols include inter-rater agreement scoring, escalation routes to senior clinicians, and visual review dashboards.

Real-World Example: Radiology AI

An AI company building a breast cancer detection tool may need thousands of annotated mammograms. Using Scale AI, their team can:

  • Set up diagnostic criteria (e.g., BI-RADS scoring)

  • Upload anonymized DICOM sets

  • Assign work to certified radiologists via Scale’s platform

  • Receive labeled outputs including lesion segmentation, severity classification, and radiologist comments

  • Integrate data directly into model pipelines for validation/testing

Generative AI & RLHF – Training Safer, Smarter Large Language Models

2025 is the year of Generative AI, but not just for novelty. Enterprises now use LLMs for customer support, code generation, documentation, and internal tools. However, safety and alignment remain major concerns, and RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) is the go-to solution.

Problems RLHF solves
  • Models generating hallucinations or harmful outputs

  • Difficulty quantifying “better” answers without human input

  • Adversarial or jailbroken prompts that bypass safeguards

How Scale AI powers RLHF

Scale AI offers the industry's most robust human feedback engine. Its capabilities include:

  • A/B or ranking comparison tasks: Annotators compare different LLM outputs on criteria like clarity, accuracy, tone, and safety.

  • Custom reward models: Feedback is aggregated to guide model updates via PPO or other RL techniques.

  • Red-teaming tasks: Annotators attempt to prompt unsafe, biased, or offensive responses. These inputs train better filters and moderation layers.

Developer Workflow: RLHF Loop
  1. Prompt your LLM with training tasks (e.g., customer service replies)

  2. Send outputs to Scale AI

  3. Annotators rate/compare outputs across key dimensions

  4. Feedback used to fine-tune reward models

  5. Model retrained using RL to prioritize helpful, safe, accurate responses

This loop is vital for trustworthy AI deployments in fintech, legal, education, and healthcare domains.

Defense & Public Sector – Building Strategic Advantage with AI at Scale

AI in government and defense settings must be built not just for performance but for auditability, transparency, and security. These systems support missions ranging from disaster response to national security.

Why defense AI needs tailored pipelines
  • Data is sensitive, often classified

  • Models must be explainable and accountable

  • Deployment involves human operators in the loop
Scale AI’s Defense-Grade Tools

Scale Donovan is the company’s defense-centric platform, featuring:

  • Secure environments: Air-gapped infrastructure, zero-trust architecture

  • Military-grade compliance: FedRAMP, ITAR, DoD RMF protocols

  • Analyst-in-the-loop workflows: For ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance), targeting, and battlefield analysis

  • Advanced geospatial annotation: Including satellite, aerial, and drone footage
Developer Use Case: Disaster Relief AI

An agency deploying AI for wildfire analysis can use Scale AI to:

  • Annotate satellite imagery for fire spread, evacuation zones

  • Integrate real-time drone feeds labeled with infrastructure risk levels

  • Route labeled insights into predictive models for logistics planning

This not only accelerates response time but also reduces risk for responders.

Retail & E-Commerce – AI That Understands Products as Humans Do

Product discovery, search relevance, personalization, retail AI needs rich product metadata. But labeling thousands of new SKUs weekly is hard without automation and quality control.

E-Commerce Labeling Needs
  • Images labeled with multiple attributes: color, style, fit, material

  • Semantic product categories

  • Regional/language-specific metadata (e.g., “trainers” vs “sneakers”)

  • Visual embeddings for similarity matching
How Scale AI boosts retail intelligence

Using Scale’s platform, e-commerce developers can:

  • Upload new product images from CMS or inventory APIs

  • Automatically receive detailed annotations within hours

  • Use labeled data to train visual search models, recommendation engines, or content moderation filters

Custom ontologies allow alignment with internal taxonomies and customer-facing filters, such as "eco-friendly" or "sustainable."

Developer Use Case: Visual AI for Fashion Retail

A fashion e-commerce site may use Scale AI to:

  • Tag clothing with structured attributes (e.g., sleeve length, neckline, pattern)

  • Train a visual recommendation model for “shop the look” features

  • Moderate UGC images using AI filters trained on labeled datasets

Final Thoughts: Why Scale AI is Essential in 2025

The gap between great AI and production AI is closing, but only for teams who master their data pipelines. Scale AI has become the de facto infrastructure layer for building data-centric, robust, and safe enterprise models.

For developers, this means:

  • No more annotation bottlenecks

  • Rapid iteration cycles

  • High trust and explainability in model outcomes

  • Tools built for engineers, scalable, API-first, and automated

From AVs to LLMs to defense AI, the teams building real impact are those who treat data as code. And like good code, labeled data needs structure, quality, review processes, and tooling.

That’s what Scale AI delivers. And that’s why it’s the backbone of modern enterprise AI.