An alternative to the neural network architectures at the heart of AI models like OpenAI’s o1 is having a moment. Called symbolic AI, it uses rules pertaining to particular tasks, like rewriting lines of text, to solve larger problems.
Symbolic AI can deftly tackle some problems that neural networks struggle with. And recent research has shown that it can be scalable. (Historically, symbolic architectures haven’t been compute-efficient.)
The scalability breakthroughs have fueled a wellspring of startups applying symbolic AI to various domains, like Orby and TekTonic (which are building enterprise automation tools), Symbolica, and Unlikely AI (founded by Alexa co-creator William Tunstall-Pedoe). One of the newest ventures to emerge from stealth is Augmented Intelligence, backed by $44 million from investors including former IBM President Jim Whitehurst.
Augmented Intelligence builds conversational AI that it claims is both more predictable and “agentic” — the latest AI buzzword du jour — than your typical neural network-based system. For example, instead of simply answering a question about flights to Mexico with instructions on how to book, Augmented Intelligence’s AI can give a list of fares and book the flight for you, CEO Ohad Elhelo says.
But wait — can’t ChatGPT already do that? Yes, Elhelo admits. But he claims that it requires more setup and manual integration than Augmented Intelligence’s tech.
“There’s a big difference between chatbots like ChatGPT, whose primary goal is to chat with the user, and conversational agents that take actions or work on behalf of companies,” Elhelo told TechCrunch. “Once you connect the AI to tools — either to retrieve information or to act — the model is not relying anymore on its training data, and the quality of intelligence drops dramatically.”
Elhelo co-founded Augmented Intelligence with Ori Cohen in 2017. Back then, the company had a different name — Delegate (and before that, Stuff) — and had a different, more polarizing mission: providing an AI-powered app where customers could delegate tasks to low-paid gig workers.
Elhelo gave the elevator pitch for Delegate in a 2019 interview: “If an hour of [a business exec’s] time is worth, let’s say $50, why spend it on the phone with customer service or reading online customer reviews when there’s someone else in India, East Jerusalem, or the Philippines willing to do it for much less?”
Delegate’s scathing Glassdoor reviews suggest that it was difficult for gig workers to make much money at all. Workers complain of bugs and a “waitlising” system that made the platform difficult to use, little-to-no support or training, and an incentive structure that dangled the promise of higher pay but rarely awarded it.
So — under pressure to pivot — Elhelo and Cohen embraced the AI route.
Augmented Intelligence’s AI can power chatbots that answer questions about any number of topics (e.g. “Do you price match on this product?”), integrating with a company’s existing APIs and workflows. Elhelo claims the AI was trained on conversation data from tens of thousands of human customer service agents.
I asked Elhelo if the conversations came from Delegate. He wouldn’t say — nor would he say whether any agents were paid for their contributions, or whether agents were informed that their data would be used in this way.
Setting aside for a moment peoples’ feelings on brand chatbots, why would a company choose Augmented Intelligence over another AI vendor? Well, for one, Elhelo says that its AI is trained to use tools to bring in info from outside sources to complete tasks. AI from OpenAI, Anthropic, and others can similarly make use of tools, but Elhelo claims that Augmented Intelligence’s AI performs better than neural network-driven solutions.
The AI is also more explainable because it provides a log of how it responded to queries and why, Elhelo asserts — giving companies a way to fine-tune and improve its performance. And it doesn’t train on a company’s data, using only the resources it’s been given permission to access for specific contexts, Elhelo says.
“Augmented Intelligence does not require training on company information,” Elhelo said, “and takes into consideration the deploying company’s rule-based instructions.”
That bit about not training on customer data will surely appeal to businesses wary of exposing secrets to a third-party AI. Apple, among others, reportedly banned staff from using OpenAI tools last year, citing concerns about confidential data leakage.
Now, Elhelo makes some dubious claims, like that Augmented Intelligence’s AI can “eliminate hallucinations” (it most certainly cannot). But the 40-employee company appears to be winning business nonetheless, most recently securing a strategic partnership with Google Cloud to bring its models to the platform.
Elhelo wouldn’t share info on revenue. But he did tell TechCrunch that Augmented Intelligence’s last $10 million fundraising round, led by New Era Capital Partners, valued it at $350 million — a relatively high figure for an AI vendor that only recently brought its product to market (and wasn’t founded by a titan of the AI industry).
“Traditional models excel at pattern recognition and language generation,” Elhelo said. “However, these architectures fall short in situations where the model needs to perform actions, make decisions, or interact with tools. Apollo’s neuro-symbolic architecture and possibilities it unlocks for companies solves those problems.”