AIAI EngineerJul 31, 2024· 5:41

Emergence Launch: AI Agents and the future enterprise: Dr. Satya Nitta

Dr. Satya Nitta introduces Emergence, an R&D-led AI company spun out of IBM Research with talent from Google Brain, Alexa, and Meta, focused on advancing AI agents for enterprise. The company's core product, the Orchestrator Agent (G8, launching in August), plans, acts, and verifies across multiple LLMs and agents to automate complex workflows like claims processing. Emergence also develops Agent E, an open-source web agent that tops the Web Voyager benchmark by autonomously controlling the web. Nitta emphasizes the company's R&D on self-improvement agents, AI planning and reasoning, and agent-oriented programming, with applications in enterprise RPA and document processing. The goal is to enable enterprises to build and deploy autonomous agents that drive productivity by operating software and web browsers.

Transcript

Intro0:00

Dr. Satya Nitta0:14

I'm here to tell you a little bit about what we're doing at Emergence in the field of AI agents, but first I want to tell you guys a few things about who we are. So we're an R&D-led AI company advancing the science and development of agents, and we come from some of the world's top AI labs, founding a team out of IBM Research, and then we attracted talent from places like Google Brain, Alexa, the Allen Institute of AI, Meta, Microsoft, etc.

But even more importantly, we have built and deployed some of the most scaled AI deployments on the planet, from the IBM Watson platform to Alexa to the backend recommendation engines behind Amazon Prime, Amazon Video, Twitter, Eventbrite, etc. So we really think of ourselves as distributed systems meets AI R&D team, and our goal is to work on AI agents and to enable all of you to build agents to transform the world.

The Promise1:09

Dr. Satya Nitta1:09

So we're all here today because we're excited about what's actually coming out in AI. So the long promise of AI, over the last several decades, has always been that AI will perform actions for us. That's what science fiction authors have told us since the 1940s and '50s, and I think the time's finally here.

And in particular, what we're very excited about is AI that will operate things like web browsers and various other enterprise systems and software, and in the process, drive great productivity benefits for everybody, both in consumer and especially in enterprise, which is our focus.

So we're interested in enterprise because the most interesting workflows are actually in enterprise, and this will really stress and push the limits of what AI can do, in particular what autonomous AI can do. And so what we're building to enable that future to come to pass with the help of all of you are two very infrastructural platforms, the first of which will be G8 in August.

Orchestrator2:09

Dr. Satya Nitta2:09

Early access is already liveright now, so you can go sign up for it. This is called an Orchestrator Agent. So first of all, it's an agent, and in the sense that it acts, it plans, it basically also verifies.

So it finishes that agentic loop between planning, acting, and verifying. It remembers and improves over time. But what does it do? It actually allows you to orchestrate across multiple agents and stitch them together in complex workflows. A simple version of it is you could simply orchestrate across multiple LLMs, generalist and open-source LLMs, but more complex versions of it will basically enable you to solve very complex enterprise workflows like claims processing, etc.

Now, an Orchestrator is only as good as the agents it will orchestrate to. So one of the exciting things that we're doing here is integrating the Orchestrator with a project that is currently being developed in the open source called Agent E.

Agent E2:52

Dr. Satya Nitta3:07

Agent E is a project that my colleague Tamer had a session on earlier this afternoon. It's a web agent. It's basically meant to control the web like a human would, and currently it's the best web agent on the planet.

Demo3:21

Dr. Satya Nitta3:21

It's topping the Web Voyager benchmark, and it's designed to basically be used to build multiple enterprise workflows and work seamlessly with the Orchestrator Agent. So I'm going to play a short video that will show you a little bit more about both these agents, and then I'll wrap the talk up.

Okay, we don't have sound, so maybe I'll talk over it. So our first product is the Orchestrator.

Generalist and task-specific LLMs and agents, all using appropriate guardrails. The Developer Dashboard helps analyze prompts, optimize cost and latency, create new models with your data, and enhance existing ones. Build with confidence, knowing your solution is future-proof and can migrate to the latest LLMs on demand.

The Orchestrator is an intelligent agent that improves with use, connecting to agents like Agent E, our web automation agent in development in our R&D labs. Agent E is an open-source agent designed to learn how to autonomously operate the web and automate complex workflows.

For example, get us a reservation for 15 people near the office around 6:00 PM. We like Asian, Mediterranean, and Mexican. Send the details to Levi, please. At Emergence, our mission is to advance the science of AI agents by tackling core AI problems like planning and self-improvement to enable the full transformation of AI and benefit the world.

Outro4:52

Dr. Satya Nitta4:52

Okay, so just in conclusion, in our R&D labs, our area of focus is around self-improvement agents. This is our core focus, and in the process, we will advance things like AI planning and reasoning, and also solve things like how agents should be stitched together in really interesting ways through something called agent-oriented programming.

And we're doing all of this in the context of enterprise workflows like RPA and document processing, etc. So that's my time. Thank you so much. See us at our booth.