Augmented Intelligence partnered with Google Cloud to deliver smarter enterprise AI agents
AI startup Augmented Intelligence has emerged from stealth with $44 million in funding and a Google Cloud partnership, offering Apollo, a neuro-symbolic AI platform that combines neural networks with rule-based systems to create more explainable and efficient AI agents.
Augmented Intelligence (AUI) has emerged from stealth with $44 million raised in several rounds between 2018 and 2024, and a strategic partnership to offer its products through Google Cloud. Augmented Intelligence adopts what it calls a neuro-symbolic approach to building AI agents, which means that it combines neural networks, the basis for generative AI systems, with rule-based symbolic AI.
According to the company, Apollo (its flagship product) enables the construction of agents that can understand and generate language, like LLM-based agents (or transformer-based agents, as AUI calls them) do. However, unlike traditional agents, Apollo-based agents can structure their reasoning according to explicit rules and receive feedback specific to a component of the general reasoning process.
AUI claims that its novel approach can produce agents and systems that are explainable, modular, able to incorporate rules into their reasoning process, and importantly, data-efficient. Expectedly, the company is cautious not to reveal too much about its approach, which it describes as having a structured interaction state at its core. AUI describes this structured interaction state as "a symbolic, parameterized representation of each interaction, created by collecting and organizing sensory data." Structured interaction states are beneficial because they are human and machine-readable, capture context nuances, and enable advanced reasoning including continuous improvement and better tool use.
The partnership with Google Cloud will give AUI access to Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform and machine learning tools. Moreover, Apollo will integrate with Google's BigQuery and other products to enhance its performance, including giving customers the ability to perform structured search on conversations. By making Apollo available through the Google Cloud infrastructure, customers will be able to leverage AI agents for various use cases in a diverse range of enterprise sectors, including retail and banking.
