O9 Enhances Digital Brain with GenAI Capabilities

o9, the leading AI software platform for integrated planning and decisioning, today announced it has made significant advancements to its Digital Brain platform by incorporating a rich set of Generative AI (GenAI) powered capabilities to its core Enterprise Knowledge Graph models (EKG). These innovations will drive step-change in expertise levels and productivity of not just the planning functions, but all business functions across supply chain, procurement, finance and sales that participate in planning and drive decisions.

o9’s trailblazing Digital Brain platform with its EKG model at the core had strong AI roots from the very inception. It has driven significant value by bringing siloes across supply chain, finance, and sales onto a single collaborative planning platform. The EKG model – a digital twin of the knowledge of end-to-end operations – was key to connecting daily, weekly, monthly and long-range planning processes, and extending collaboration to customers and suppliers.

AI-Driven Knowledge Integration

Chakri Gottemukkala, o9 Co-Founder and CEO, said, “The AI roots of our Digital Brain platform give us a significant edge in the usage of GenAI. While our Digital Brain platform was transformative in the scope of integrated planning, there were some constraints limiting the level of knowledge being ingested and modeled in the EKG. For example, if a question was asked about why actuals deviated from the sales forecast, or why production deviated from the plan, only a portion of the knowledge required to answer the question was in the system depending on the maturity of the organization. The majority of insight is still derived from ‘tribal knowledge’ – the information that exists in the minds of people, which is presented and discussed in unstructured ways. As a result, the dots don’t get connected in time, and even if they do, the knowledge dissipates.”

Another challenge, Gottemukkala added, “In any organization or function there is a real bell curve in the expertise levels of people. Operating on the same data and system, the experts do a better job of creating more reliable plans, running scenarios and getting buy-in from management on plans and decisions. This problem of reducing the expertise disparity is something that we realized that GenAI has a huge potential to solve.”

o9’s R&D team, in close collaboration with leading providers of GenAI technologies, has developed a set of capabilities that help the conversion of tribal knowledge to digital knowledge in its EKG model. In every planning cycle, GenAI-powered analysis of the plan versus actual collects the tribal knowledge outside of the o9 platform, and enables it to be systematically converted into digital knowledge. As a result, o9’s knowledge model gets progressively faster and more intelligent in explaining the plan versus actual deviations, with less effort.

Powered by GenAI, o9’s platform now enables expert users to train the model on their expertise through simple conversational methods. Anand Srinivasan, o9’s Chief Strategy Officer, who drives the Company’s AI strategies with Umesh Arasu, o9’s Chief Product Officer, said, “We have built capabilities that enable the digitization of expertise at scale in a simple fashion. For example, an expert planner’s ‘knowledge recipe’ for running a scenario when there is a demand upside can be digitized as a recipe that is available for all planners to invoke. Tribal knowledge and expertise in every domain from sales to supply chain to procurement can be converted into a digital knowledge graph of that domain.”

Arasu, who leads o9’s AI-powered transformations, said, “These capabilities make expertise truly available at the fingertips of everyone within the organization to answer the three ‘W’s’ of business questions related to planning better and faster: What happened and why? What is likely to happen? And what course-correcting actions to take? We are driving these innovations with our leading customers, and are excited about the results we expect to see in 2024 and 2025.”

“The enthusiasm surrounding GenAI is palpable, and o9 is at the forefront of exploring and leveraging its capabilities for transforming enterprise-wide planning and decision-making,” Gottemukkala added. “By combining o9’s EKG with large language models (LLMs), all of the critical knowledge and experience within a company’s operations can be digitized and incorporated into the Digital Brain. Over time, more and more invaluable unstructured and structured information will be added to it, and its output will continuously improve. Companies of the future will compete on the strength of the digital knowledge models powering their planning capabilities, and our platform is central to that value proposition.”