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What if artificial intelligence could do more than see anecdotal evidence of where business growth is and identify the actions to drive that growth?
That’s the promise of neurosymbolic AI.
Neurosymbolic AI fuses the statistical power, pattern recognition, and adaptability of neural networks—think large language models (LLMs)—with the logical, rule-based structure of symbolic reasoning that can predict real outcomes while helping prevent the hallucinations generative AI (GenAI) may produce.
Correlation isn’t causation. Summer is, of course, prime ice cream season in California, and that’s also when shark bites are most prevalent—but enjoying your mint chip cone won’t make it more likely you’ll get bitten. Neurosymbolic AI sorts out the coincidence and lets you dig down into what’s really causing those shark bites.
How EY-Parthenon can help
Our EY Growth Platforms team uses neurosymbolic AI to help companies turn diverse data into tailored AI products for revenue and profit growth. Learn how.
Read morePattern recognition and rules, coupled with business knowledge, help companies identify workflows for new ways to make money. In fact, some analysts have recognized the merits of neurosymbolic AI for some time. While research continues, however, neurosymbolic AI is already delivering value, especially in workflows where structured facts, explainable logic, unstructured data, and natural language need to work together.
The EY-Parthenon neurosymbolic AI team is working with clients to use the EY Growth Platforms’ neurosymbolic platform to plot business scenarios at hyperspeed and find previously unseen paths for growth.
For example, leaders at one global equipment manufacturer were attempting to quantify the impact of new tariffs on their business. Their exercise included an analysis of historical transaction data and market sentiment and an understanding of where the company had price elasticity.
The analysis took the company four months. Using its proprietary data with our neurosymbolic AI platform, which can access over 100 million data sources, the company achieved the same result in one day.
A brief history of tension
“Neuro” (neural networks) and “symbolic” (symbolic reasoning) have battled for attention over the years. Symbolic, with applications like a chess-playing computer that could beat a human world champion, was in vogue from the 1960s through the 1990s. More recently, LLMs have attracted more of the business world’s attention—and investment—due to the prevalence of GenAI.
Today, businesses can turn this systemic conflict between neuro and symbolic into cooperation. Think of a basic online search for a dress to wear at a wedding. Typing in “white wedding dress” uses neural pattern recognition. Typing in “size 10 white wedding dress” adds in the symbolic rule to get a much more useful result.
A side-by-side comparison highlights the advantages of neurosymbolic AI as a growth engine, with symbolic reasoning expanding on the benefits of GenAI by uncovering value in the market that may otherwise be invisible.
Neurosymbolic AI across industries
How can the neurosymbolic advantage help businesses grow? By replacing intuition with reasoned, repeatable, data-backed strategy that can serve the needs of businesses, customers, and even regulators. Unlike GenAI, which some have likened to a “black box,” neurosymbolic AI is completely traceable, which is essential in highly regulated industries such as insurance and health care.
The retail market, with customers’ growing desire for personalized recommendations, is a prime candidate for neurosymbolic AI. As an example, one large retailer was grappling with frequently changing consumer preferences, which outpaced the time it needed to introduce new products. The company lost out on sales because it relied on beliefs, without any analytical backing, that its products would sell.
Neurosymbolic AI team members and the retailer developed a platform that identifies trends and expedites ideation and testing processes to accelerate product development. That’s where business value is created—knowing when to apply rules on top of neural inference.
From buzz to backbone
Companies can gain a competitive edge with neurosymbolic AI by using the technology’s predictive power to enhance forecasting, pricing, and market expansion strategies. This approach accelerates decision making and scales new growth platforms, enabling organizations to rapidly identify and act on diverse opportunities more quickly.
GenAI may have captured businesses’ full attention, but it isn’t made to handle all of their strategic growth needs. Neurosymbolic AI addresses what corporations need now: explainable, integrated, causal decision making at global scale.
Morgan Cole, EY-Parthenon, EY Growth Platforms Chief of Staff, contributed to this article.
Neurosymbolic AI is the AI technology for growth, providing companies with actionable insights to find new revenue opportunities before their competition. It combines pattern recognition and rules with business knowledge to help enable causal decision making at a global scale.
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