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Beyond Limits Award Write Up

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Beyond Limits receives the Frost & Sullivan 2019 North American Symbolic AI for Business Process Automation Technology Innovation Award

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Beyond Limits Award Write Up

  1. 1. FROST & SULLIVAN BEST PRACTICES AWARD Technology Innovation 2019 SYMBOLIC AI FOR BUSINESS PROCESS AUTOMATION - NORTH AMERICA
  2. 2. BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH © Frost & Sullivan 2019 2 “We Accelerate Growth” Contents Background and Company Performance ...................................................................... 3 Industry Challenges............................................................................................ 3 Technology Attributes and Future Business Value of Beyond Limits............................ 4 Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 7 Significance of Technology Innovation......................................................................... 8 Understanding Technology Innovation......................................................................... 8 Key Benchmarking Criteria .................................................................................. 9 Technology Attributes......................................................................................... 9 Future Business Value......................................................................................... 9 Best Practices Recognition: 10 Steps to Researching, Identifying, and Recognizing Best Practices............................................................................................................... 10 The Intersection between 360-Degree Research and Best Practices Awards.................... 11 Research Methodology ...................................................................................... 11 About Frost & Sullivan ............................................................................................ 11
  3. 3. BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH © Frost & Sullivan 2019 3 “We Accelerate Growth” Background and Company Performance Industry Challenges Artificial intelligence (AI) systems represent one of the most transformative technological developments of the 21st century, with lofty goals and even loftier potential and promise. However, the actual implementation and applications of AI will be more incremental than headlines proclaim. The first blush of AI revolves around reinterpreting and repackaging new data visualization and pattern-finding engines—these are traditional numeric approaches built upon well-defined data sets and well-known problems set in a controlled environment. The limitations of formless or incomplete data hinder the applicability of AI systems and their broad deployment. More creative AI, capable of improvisation and autonomy, requires the ability to learn and hypothesize beyond numeric data sets to include a symbolic approach that can interpret complex and unstructured information, analyze problems, repurpose prior related experience, and extemporize solutions to compound issues—similar to human reasoning. To date, AI uses have been specific purpose driven platforms that used human-defined static workflows to produce actionable intelligence. While proprietary data can be a competitive asset in the race to popularize AI, service providers and innovators are holding technology closely, and, thus, the advancements are speculative until proven1 . Leveraging massive amounts of data to train AI, innovative service providers are driving new business models and consumer experiences for banks and financial services organizations. Drawing from the Big Data boom, key enabling technologies are developing to deliver robotic process automation, intelligent edge computing, and previously unimagined levels of detailed analytics and predictive insights. Providing massive cost savings and coordinating highly detailed optimization recommendations, these AI applications will transform the various sectors. However, these use cases are in a relatively nascent stage of development with a fragmented ecosystem of services providers, methods, and technology architectures vying for not only for market share but to demonstrate the ability to deliver on the promises.2 In large and complex production settings and intricate digital transactions, the goal of AI is to maximize optimization and also, crucially, to augment existing domain knowledge and human intelligence with preexisting knowledge bases. Across a variety of use cases, truly additive AI should help human decision makers by delivering intelligence in the field—an intelligence capable of explaining its reasoning (for compliance and traceability purposes)— and intelligence that is contextually aware of how complex systems interact and predict future needs and events.3 AI-informed enterprise operations can consolidate and simplify 1 Global Next Wave Technology Disruptors, 2018:Uncovering the Technologies that will Transform Vertical Markets and Society, (Frost & Sullivan, April 2019).; and Innovations in Hydrogen Generation, Phototherapy, Lithium-ion Batteries, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Autonomous Cars, (Frost & Sullivan, April 2019). 2 Technology Convergence Enabling Future of Digital Work: Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Blockchain, Edge Computing, and Robotic Process Automation Drive Opportunities in Future Workplace, (Frost & Sullivan, September 2018). 3 Disruptive Technologies Transforming Digital Oil Field: Sensors, Block Chain, and Predictive Analytics Driving Opportunities in the Oil and Gas Sector, (Frost & Sullivan, June 2018).; and AI Innovations in Future of Manufacturing Intelligent Manufacturing Technologies Enable Cognitive Factories, (Frost & Sullivan, December 2017).
  4. 4. BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH © Frost & Sullivan 2019 4 “We Accelerate Growth” business data analysis, repetitive and routine tasks, minimize operations costs, and mitigate risks. While the end-results are novel, these AI technologies are notoriously unable to explain their reasoning processes in a way that harmonizes with existing compliance, regulatory, and safety procedures.4 In costly and complex use cases, AI systems must justify their costs. Future trading predictions and equipment repair and replacement are expensive, and operators are loath to take risks with new deployments. Relatedly, the AI must demonstrate the flexibility to run in multiple settings (on-premise, cloud, at the edge) and truly adapt to the range of applications needed. Moreover, making such systems functional for a range of users and skill sets continues to limit adoption.5 In the most complex and interrelated enterprise systems (such as trading the financial services sector, operating oil and gas refineries) administrators and managers must be able to understand how all the parts of the system affect one another and the system overall. Typically, this knowledge and experience base builds up over many years of exposure and learning, informed with training as well as data analysis and automation. To drive the next optimized processes, organizations will need to gather and capitalize on that knowledge base to truly deliver informed artificial intelligence. AI systems that can combine diverse data inputs with human intelligence, to analyze and recommend meaningful and actionable outcomes (through virtual assistance and intelligent robots) can enable significant improvements and deliver a substantial return on investment. Technology Attributes and Future Business Value of Beyond Limits The origins of Beyond Limits reach back to projects undertaken at the California Institute of Technology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to develop AI initiatives for NASA. To operate on the surface of distant moons and planets, an AI system needed the toolsets and abilities to infer and make decisions on their own. After 20+ years of technology vetting, Beyond Limits is now the holder of exclusive commercial rights to this cognitive approach to problem-solving. Symbolic Reasoning Works with Unstructured Data to Arrive at Improved Solutions Beyond Limits brings to market a symbolic AI system capable of making independent decisions from missing, misleading, or sparse data—an innovation that enables decision making similar to human reasoning. Whereas most AI services rely on traditional numeric and machine learning (ML) approaches to create new clean visualizations of existing data to solve clearly defined problems, Beyond Limits leverages numeric and ML layers with symbolic reasoning to create solutions on the fly. The Beyond Limits system draws from nearly any possible data format and expertise (including incomplete, unstructured, or unconventional formats), in contrast to traditional numeric processing. From little to no data, Beyond Limits’ symbolic AI can divine a solution and recommend actions—mimicking 4 FinTech—Growth Opportunities in the Global Market: Comprehensive Products and Services will Disrupt and Transform Financial Services, (Frost & Sullivan, January 2018). 5 AI Innovations in Future of Manufacturing, Intelligent Manufacturing Technologies Enable Cognitive Factories, (Frost & Sullivan, December 2017).
  5. 5. BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH © Frost & Sullivan 2019 5 “We Accelerate Growth” human decision making. When little or no data is available, the symbolic technologies rely more on their deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning capabilities. When sufficient data is available, various numeric AI approaches are automatically used by the symbolic reasoners. The symbolic AI layer Beyond Limits develops considers potential paths and compares against past performance and incorporates human knowledge—allowing the system to learn each time it attempts a problem and getting smarter with each iteration. Iterating and learning from mistakes, the Beyond Limits symbolic reasoning formulates solutions by human-readable representations of the problem going through logical steps. Explainable and Auditable Cognitive Agents Make the Difference The company refers to its deliverables as “advisors,” or cognitive agents (or clones), that provide tangible results and recommendations that are a combination of numeric and symbolic AI processes and whose results are always explainable. These explainable results, or “cognitive audit trails,” are derived from cognitive patterns of life technologies that automatically capture all of the internal inferences that were used to generate the result. These audit trails are used internally, to provide heuristics and hints to other reasoners, and can also be reformulated by other symbolic technologies into a variety of formats, including English narratives for human consumption. Generating solutions from the symbolic reasoning layer, Beyond Limits’ AI systems explain in intelligible reasoning why and how it reaches conclusions. This key explainability factor makes for auditable processes and adjustments based on the human experts included in the loop who make the ultimate decisions. The explainability and auditable trail with Beyond Limits’ cognitive AI would be impossible with traditional numeric processes— commonly referred to as black boxes—that lack clear reasoning and focus on achieving contextually aware results. As the customer becomes more familiar with the system, building accuracy, veracity, and credibility, then the advisor can automate further processes gradually. Attacking unique problems, Beyond Limits embeds in the customer’s organization to learn as much as possible about the inside operations to learn the business problems to solve, even if they are not immediately evident to the customer. Apart from the marketing hype of many AI firms, Beyond Limits delivers these advisors to play a supporting role to human decision making—helping to standardize and optimize operations across a process. Beyond Limits advisors formulate options to make facilities run smarter and more reliably, speeding up the human learning curve to make expert level decisions faster. Gathering Human Knowledge and Democratizing Expertise The cognitive AI built by Beyond Limits gathers the expertise of human knowledge and combines it with the symbolic AI engine to support human decision makers and share the decades of learning from the most senior and experienced human capital. Capturing knowledge via two paths (how to make decisions and what to do when a problem arises) the AI system processes the accumulated knowledge base of senior and experienced managers, traders, and analysts to make that available across the organization. Ingesting nearly any type of data format (e.g., text (logs and documents, spreadsheets), images,
  6. 6. BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH © Frost & Sullivan 2019 6 “We Accelerate Growth” and real-time streaming text and numeric sources) the system interprets the data, and the cognitive AI replicates the performance and decision-making approaches of the highest performing individuals. For example, with encoding that incorporates human knowledge into the cognitive agents, Beyond Limits helps organizations pivot when the most valuable and experienced individuals in a workforce are retiring. The company’s cognitive advisors are especially powerful in situations when there is little, or misleading, data available, but bringing a wealth of experience to bear will yield positive results. The Beyond Limits symbolic system gathers massive amounts of data, filters through human experiences, and symbolically comprehends the context of a situation to develop actionable recommendations and verifiable hypotheses. Serving as a second set of unbiased eyes, Beyond Limits’ advisors can help younger workers augment their abilities with richer information and validated recommendations. General Optimization and Specific Use Cases Beyond Limits leverages cognitive AI to apply optimization and results-oriented solutions generally applicable to a variety of production environments but customized for specific customers’ highly complex instances. In situations where slightly changing the margins in a process will yield millions of dollars in savings, Beyond Limits focuses on developing highly strategic and results-oriented applications, e.g., industrial and production facilities, finance, healthcare. In the first application set, for the energy sector, Beyond Limits helps major refinery operations to optimize their massive Internet of things (IoT) systems. Surpassing simple predictive maintenance, Beyond Limits’ cognitive AI understands the entire system of production operations as a linked whole and enables continued operation. With this full context, the cognitive engine recognizes how impediments in one system affect the outputs of the larger operation and the advisor makes recommendations in real time to adjust specific components or take certain components offline while still managing output. Beyond Limits’ advisors deliver efficiency and operations savings, as well as the layer on top of conditions monitoring to actively look years forward, based on trending data, to predict the deleterious effects of wear-and-tear on systems and what do to minimize impacts. In drilling well operations, for example, sediment buildup in particular underground locations impact the throughput of the entire setup; Beyond Limits is already leveraging data and human expertise to improve decisions and save time and budget. Moreover, the company is partnering with global financial services providers for pilot programs for more pragmatic and informed methods to analyze and direct propensity scoring for business loans.
  7. 7. BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH © Frost & Sullivan 2019 7 “We Accelerate Growth” Conclusion Originating from technology developed for autonomous space missions, Beyond Limits brings to market a system of symbolic artificial intelligence (AI) which mimics Human-like reasoning. Pushing past conventional AI’s limitations to defined data sets and controlled environments, Beyond Limits’ AI draws from small, incomplete, or unstructured data sources and provides reasoned and auditable solutions. The cognitive AI couples symbolic reasoning with machine learning approaches and filters through the accumulated knowledge gathered from field experts to generate contextually informed solutions and recommendations. For a variety of highly complex use cases of interdependent systems and variables, Beyond Limits’ cognitive AI advisors help organizations replicate the top performing and most experienced individuals in a facility to guide decision making across the board. With its innovative symbolic reasoning AI driving optimization and sharing accumulated expertise across a variety of industries, Beyond Limits earns Frost & Sullivan’s 2019 North America Technology Innovation Award for symbolic AI for business process automation.
  8. 8. BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH © Frost & Sullivan 2019 8 “We Accelerate Growth” Significance of Technology Innovation Ultimately, growth in any organization depends on finding new ways to excite the market and maintaining a long-term commitment to innovation. At its core, technology innovation, or any other type of innovation, can only be sustained with leadership in 3 key areas: understanding demand, nurturing the brand, and differentiating from the competition. Understanding Technology Innovation Technology innovation begins with a spark of creativity that is systematically pursued, developed, and commercialized. That spark can result from a successful partnership, a productive in-house innovation group, or a bright-minded individual. Regardless of the source, the success of any new technology is ultimately determined by its innovativeness and its impact on the business as a whole.
  9. 9. BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH © Frost & Sullivan 2019 9 “We Accelerate Growth” Key Benchmarking Criteria For the Technology Innovation Award, Frost & Sullivan analysts independently evaluated two key factors—Technology Attributes and Future Business Value—according to the criteria identified below. Technology Attributes Criterion 1: Industry Impact Requirement: Technology enables the pursuit of groundbreaking ideas, contributing to the betterment of the entire industry. Criterion 2: Product Impact Requirement: Specific technology helps enhance features and functionalities of the entire product line for the company. Criterion 3: Scalability Requirement: Technology is scalable, enabling new generations of products over time, with increasing levels of quality and functionality. Criterion 4: Visionary Innovation Requirement: Specific new technology represents true innovation based on a deep understanding of future needs and applications. Criterion 5: Application Diversity Requirement: New technology serves multiple products, multiple applications, and multiple user environments. Future Business Value Criterion 1: Financial Performance Requirement: Potential is high for strong financial performance in terms of revenues, operating margins, and other relevant financial metrics. Criterion 2: Customer Acquisition Requirement: Specific technology enables acquisition of new customers, even as it enhances value to current customers. Criterion 3: Technology Licensing Requirement: New technology displays great potential to be licensed across many sectors and applications, thereby driving incremental revenue streams. Criterion 4: Brand Loyalty Requirement: New technology enhances the company’s brand, creating and/or nurturing brand loyalty. Criterion 5: Human Capital Requirement: Customer impact is enhanced through the leverage of specific technology, translating into positive impact on employee morale and retention.
  10. 10. BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH © Frost & Sullivan 2019 10 “We Accelerate Growth” Best Practices Recognition: 10 Steps to Researching, Identifying, and Recognizing Best Practices Frost & Sullivan analysts follow a 10-step process to evaluate Award candidates and assess their fit with select best practice criteria. The reputation and integrity of the Awards are based on close adherence to this process. STEP OBJECTIVE KEY ACTIVITIES OUTPUT 1 Monitor, target, and screen Identify Award recipient candidates from around the globe • Conduct in-depth industry research • Identify emerging sectors • Scan multiple geographies Pipeline of candidates who potentially meet all best- practice criteria 2 Perform 360-degree research Perform comprehensive, 360-degree research on all candidates in the pipeline • Interview thought leaders and industry practitioners • Assess candidates’ fit with best-practice criteria • Rank all candidates Matrix positioning of all candidates’ performance relative to one another 3 Invite thought leadership in best practices Perform in-depth examination of all candidates • Confirm best-practice criteria • Examine eligibility of all candidates • Identify any information gaps Detailed profiles of all ranked candidates 4 Initiate research director review Conduct an unbiased evaluation of all candidate profiles • Brainstorm ranking options • Invite multiple perspectives on candidates’ performance • Update candidate profiles Final prioritization of all eligible candidates and companion best-practice positioning paper 5 Assemble panel of industry experts Present findings to an expert panel of industry thought leaders • Share findings • Strengthen cases for candidate eligibility • Prioritize candidates Refined list of prioritized Award candidates 6 Conduct global industry review Build consensus on Award candidates’ eligibility • Hold global team meeting to review all candidates • Pressure-test fit with criteria • Confirm inclusion of all eligible candidates Final list of eligible Award candidates, representing success stories worldwide 7 Perform quality check Develop official Award consideration materials • Perform final performance benchmarking activities • Write nominations • Perform quality review High-quality, accurate, and creative presentation of nominees’ successes 8 Reconnect with panel of industry experts Finalize the selection of the best-practice Award recipient • Review analysis with panel • Build consensus • Select recipient Decision on which company performs best against all best-practice criteria 9 Communicate recognition Inform Award recipient of Award recognition • Present Award to the CEO • Inspire the organization for continued success • Celebrate the recipient’s performance Announcement of Award and plan for how recipient can use the Award to enhance the brand 10 Take strategic action Upon licensing, company is able to share Award news with stakeholders and customers • Coordinate media outreach • Design a marketing plan • Assess Award’s role in future strategic planning Widespread awareness of recipient’s Award status among investors, media personnel, and employees
  11. 11. BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH © Frost & Sullivan 2019 11 “We Accelerate Growth” The Intersection between 360-Degree Research and Best Practices Awards Research Methodology Frost & Sullivan’s 360-degree research methodology represents the analytical rigor of our research process. It offers a 360-degree-view of industry challenges, trends, and issues by integrating all 7 of Frost & Sullivan's research methodologies. Too often companies make important growth decisions based on a narrow understanding of their environment, leading to errors of both omission and commission. Successful growth strategies are founded on a thorough understanding of market, technical, economic, financial, customer, best practices, and demographic analyses. The integration of these research disciplines into the 360-degree research methodology provides an evaluation platform for benchmarking industry participants and for identifying those performing at best-in-class levels. About Frost & Sullivan Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, enables clients to accelerate growth and achieve best-in-class positions in growth, innovation and leadership. The company's Growth Partnership Service provides the CEO and the CEO's Growth Team with disciplined research and best practice models to drive the generation, evaluation and implementation of powerful growth strategies. Frost & Sullivan leverages more than 50 years of experience in partnering with Global 1000 companies, emerging businesses, and the investment community from 45 offices on six continents. To join our Growth Partnership, please visit http://www.frost.com. 360-DEGREE RESEARCH: SEEING ORDER IN THE CHAOS

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