Enterprise AI's Next Frontier: The Optimizable Company
The next evolution in enterprise AI involves moving beyond simply integrating AI into existing systems, focusing instead on creating a formal model of the company—an ontology—to enable optimization.
The future of enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) is shifting towards deeper modeling and optimization of internal company processes.
The traditional approach of adding AI to existing systems and workflows has revealed limitations. The issue is not AI's capability to act, but companies' insufficient methods for formally representing their operations and their implications.
A company is not just a collection of applications like CRM or data lakes, but a complex causal system. Future enterprise AI necessitates a formal model of the company, an ontology, that describes the structure of its components and their interrelationships.
The ontology maps the company's entities, their properties, and their connections. For instance, information and functionalities related to customers, contracts, products, and orders are modeled into a unified structure. This allows AI systems to better understand and manage the company's operations.
However, a static ontology is insufficient, as companies are constantly changing. Instead, a dynamic and ultimately optimizable ontology is required. It should not only describe the company's operations but also improve them. The goal is to transform the ontology into an optimization platform for the company, where every workflow and action is linked to measurable outcomes and learning.