Aera: The Cognitive Operating System for the Self-Driving Enterprise

An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

I am at once excited about how AI-powered systems will give rise to what I call the cognitive enterprise, and at the same time, I am always skeptical of the hyperbole-laden claims of the would-be purveyors of the technology that will (eventually) make them a reality. Aera Technology is unabashedly stepping into the middle of this morass.

The company boldly claims to be what it calls the cognitive operating system for the self-driving enterprise. While the company acknowledges that we are still in the early stages of this journey, its goal is to operate without human intervention and enable its clients to create fully autonomous operational processes. To achieve this, the company’s technology continuously crawls an enterprise’s operational systems and harvests data from them. It claims to do this in real-time and without impact to production.

It then applies content structures and computational models to compiled data and recommends actions, predicts business outcomes, and proactively takes actions (if and when the organization permits it to do so). The systems extensibility comes in the form of what the company calls skills — essentially pre-packaged sets of applied cognition that the company (or its customers) design to solve specific business problems. For example, one currently available skill enables an organization to autonomously assess marketing and sales data to create (and execute, if desired) a promotional plan. While these skills are built using what it calls its Cognitive Development Kit, the company claims that it is the Cognitive Data Layer that it creates from the harvested data that is its secret sauce — and what will enable it to fulfill its vision of the self-driving enterprise.

Copyright © 2019 Intellyx LLC. Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. At the time of this writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.