Beyond Limits: minimising financial risk with cognitive AI
Tell me about Beyond Limits, your role and your responsibilities there.
Beyond Limits is an enterprise-scale AI company that optimises operations and boosts efficiency for large-scale, high-value industries including energy, power utilities, financial services, and healthcare. Our mission is to create impactful solutions with human-like reasoning that complement and amplify the capabilities of humans. These solutions ultimately improve decision-making to achieve efficient, sustainable, trustworthy and reliable operations for critical industries.
I am a Senior AI Solutions Architect and Data Scientist within the Office of CTO for Beyond Limits. I work with clients, our technical experts, and researchers to identify the opportunities AI can solve. I design solutions using advanced techniques and then go a step further to ensure they deliver an effective, actionable user experience.
How can companies use trending technologies and patterns, including cognitive AI, to increase value while minimising financial risk? How do Beyond Limits help with this?
In the 2021 State of AI Report published by McKinsey, surveys continue to show risk management as a key area where many organisations have room to improve. Explainability was ranked among the top relevant risks to mitigate. Leading AI organisations are more likely to adopt risk-mitigation practices in comparison to those lower on the AI maturity curve.
Recent industry and market events have highlighted the need for additional tactics and methodologies when we don’t have the underlying historical data evidence to model or synthesise it. Cognitive AI can help industry professionals more effectively discover potential opportunities for growth while optimising for use cases in minimising risk and volatility. By injecting subject matter knowledge expertise from specialists, e.g., economists, policymakers, or financial advisors into the system, Cognitive AI can help companies prepare to comprehend these riskier scenarios and guard against them, particularly when there are conflicting sources of knowledge and information.
Talk me through your advanced cognitive AI solutions, how do they support your customers?
Beyond Limit’s technology delivers more comprehensive and accurate insights than data-driven methods can perform alone, essentially picking up where data-driven methods leave off. The hybrid AI technology offering can be paired with modern data-driven methodologies. It excels in conditions when data is scarce or contains conflicting information, where there is a high level of risk for uncertainty in decisions, and “black box” related reasoning is not nearly sufficient. In many cases, there may be experiments and hypothetical paths to execute and act on, with some being more expensive or questionable than others. These cases require the ability to model intelligent “what-if” scenarios and suggest courses of action for smarter decision-making, even with less-than-ideal data.
In remote environments or those exhibiting periods of disconnected activity, slices of data are frequently unavailable and inaccurate, with different contextual events suggesting different operating conditions. Human experts are not always on-site or able to intervene. Traditional, data-hungry, and pre-trained modelling methods may attempt to enrich the existing system with additional data sources and modalities. They might model or interpolate these periods of activity but yield little improvement. A hybrid AI system that further incorporates the cognitive aspects with encoded human expert knowledge and expertise can step in to guide the system, anticipate incidents, and reason on its decisions within bounded operational constraints. These scenarios and triggers can then be presented to the decision-maker to act with greater confidence and drive successful outcomes.
What is next for Beyond Limits?
Beyond Limits is committed to creating a positive impact on society through next-generation AI technologies. The company is opening labs across the globe to conduct research critical to the advancement of our industrial-strength AI and expanding our footprint across a variety of critical sectors. Our Cognitive AI technology provides a crucial step in the progression of AI, moving beyond narrowly trained use cases. Serving as a broadening of the “Machine Teaching (MT)” principle, Cognitive AI makes the teacher more effective with domain expertise knowledge.
At Beyond Limits, we believe that the real potential of AI lies within a symbiotic relationship with people, assisting humans in the partnership to apply their attention, experience, and passions to solving critical problems. That’s why we are committed to our pursuit of evolving methodologies under the responsible AI umbrella through AI solutions that offer human-understandable reasoning and explainable audit trails in the presence of ambiguity. We will continue to advance our technology portfolio to produce high-fidelity scenarios and recommended actions, with transparency and explainability as core founding principles. The democratisation of knowledge is a top priority, and Beyond Limits aims to create AI for anyone to use and benefit from.
