AI “agents” are generative AI models that can perform tasks autonomously, such as copying information from an email and pasting it into a spreadsheet, and have been praised as Productivity SuperchargerIt’s a little early to say, because The tendency of models to make mistakes. but at least some of the founders (and Analysts And Investors) are convinced that agents are the next step in generative AI.
Bella Liu and William Lu are two such founders. Their company, Orbi AIis building a generative AI platform that seeks to automate a range of different business workflows, including data entry, document processing, and form validation.
Plenty of startups offer tools to automate repetitive, monotonous back-office business processes (see Parabola, TinesSam Altman supported Inspired A.I. And Tectonic AI(To name a few). Existing companies like Automation Anywhere and UiPath have also Moving forward with the adoption of AI Striving to keep pace with the generative AI competition.
But Liu and Lu claim that Orbi’s technology is known for its ability to learn and act on workflows in real-time, and its ability to understand patterns and relationships within an enterprise’s unstructured data.
“Orbi’s platform observes how employees perform their jobs to automatically create automations for complex tasks that require some degree of reasoning and understanding,” explained Orbi CEO Liu. “An AI agent installed on an employee’s computer effectively observes, learns, and generates automations, adapting the model as it learns.”
Liu and Lu say that with Orbi, which will be launched in secret in 2023, they sought to create an AI that could understand some of the low-level decisions workers were making and abstract those decisions away, freeing workers to focus on the key things.
Liu previously led AI and automation efforts at IBM, including product planning and AI-related mergers and acquisitions, and was UiPath’s director of AI product management. Lu is a former Nvidia systems engineer who joined Google Cloud as an engineering lead, where he helped design generative AI document and database extraction technology.
Orbi’s alleged secret formula is a cloud-based generative AI model that’s been fine-tuned to complete customer tasks, such as validating expense reports. The model relies partly on symbolic AI, a form of AI that leverages rules such as mathematical theorems to infer solutions to problems.
Symbolic AI alone can be inflexible and slow, especially when dealing with large and complex data sets. It requires clearly defined knowledge and context to perform well. But recently Research has shown that it is be able to being scalable When combined with traditional AI model architectures.
“For the past two years, we have been working on this AI model and we have had successful tests,” Liu said. “There are very few purely generative AI companies that are directly attacking the enterprise with end-to-end. We are one of them.”
Liu says Orbi’s model can intelligently adapt to changes in the workflow by analyzing API interactions and employee browser usage, such as when an app’s UI gets an update. Having software track an employee’s every move sounds like a threat to privacy. But Liu claims Orbi doesn’t actually store customer data; it only uses it to fine-tune its model, encrypting data both in transit and at rest.
“Humans are put into a complete feedback loop,” he said.
Orby, which recently raised $30 million in a Series A funding round jointly led by New Enterprise Associates and Wing, with sources saying the post-money valuation is over $100 million, is competing in a challenging field. Agentic AI coming from generative AI powerhouses like OpenAI and Anthropic has diminished the prospects of incumbent and smaller players.
Adept, a startup building AI agent technology focuses on enterprise applications, Allegedly On the verge of an acquisition deal with Microsoft, before it could even ship a single product. Amazon and Google have released A.I. Representative Tooling UiPath, on the other hand, saw sales growth last year despite pushing generative AI initiatives happen by chance In its most recent fiscal quarter.
Liu says Orbi can get ahead by taking a systematic go-to-market approach. She says the company is already generating revenue from about a dozen customers and plans to use its $35 million in funding to expand its Mountain View-based team of about 30 people.
“The funds are being used to grow our market reach, customer support, product and technology organizations,” he said. “The enterprise market has a high demand for generative AI solutions that clearly improve business performance; they are simply trying to figure out where to best apply the technology before rolling it out to their business in the near future.”
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