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Companies have mostly used AI tools to improve productivity. NSAI can help companies unlock transformational growth opportunities.
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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 moreIn a global environment where uncertainty seems to be increasing every day, organizations need to sift through myriad signals to find a route toward long-term viability and growth. And they need a platform that does it responsibly.
Artificial intelligence (AI) can be the answer, but it isn’t the AI that you may think of. Generative AI (GenAI) has the current spotlight as a productivity tool, but GenAI has its limits, including a propensity to hallucinate when asked to cite sources or make accurate predictions.
That’s where neurosymbolic AI (NSAI) comes in. While less known than GenAI, NSAI has the potential to become the platform that sees around corners, helping leaders spot opportunities that others cannot see. These can include identifying growth opportunities for a multinational corporation, discovering ways to combine molecules for new methods to treat diseases or uncovering hidden patterns in climate data that inform more resilient infrastructure planning. NSAI can help governments anticipate emerging threats by synthesizing structured intelligence with unstructured field reports. In financial services, it can detect subtle anomalies in transaction networks that signal fraud or systemic risk.
It also operates without the potentially catastrophic hallucinations common in other AI systems, and its decision-making process is completely transparent and auditable, so you can trace outputs back to the underlying logic and sources.
NSAI fuses statistical AI (pattern recognition) with symbolic AI (logic, rules, and causal structures), driving powerful pattern recognition to deliver predictions and decisions that are practical, actionable and grounded in real-world outcomes. It can simulate real-time market scenarios and their potential impact by combining and analyzing millions of points of both proprietary and public data, structured and unstructured, to produce a roadmap for growth.
NSAI is not going to replace GenAI, but there are many cases where GenAI can get an organization part of the way to its goal and then NSAI gets it over the finish line. Some of the key benefits of NSAI include:
Altogether, NSAI thrives on complexity, uncovering deep causal relationships across many dimensions, going beyond what traditional analyses can achieve. Its ability to handle intricate data structures allows it to reveal insights that other models might miss.
For example, imagine analyzing product performance by correlating variables like location granularity, competitor types, and varying product requirements across different customer segments. NSAI integrates all these factors, finding meaningful patterns even in highly complex, evolving scenarios. All told, NSAI enables smarter, more actionable decisions in environments where complexity is the norm.
This is more than just abstract potential. We have seen the benefits in many industries:
The real-world benefits are not limited to business, though. One area is the ability of NSAI to accelerate the discovery of treatments for rare and underserved medical conditions by combining deep learning with symbolic reasoning to generate explainable predictions. Academic researchers are developing neurosymbolic prototypes to identify new uses for existing drugs, where traditional pharmaceutical investment is limited due to low commercial incentives. These models not only suggest promising drug candidates but also provide transparent, testable explanations for their predictions, demonstrating how NSAI can reduce drug development costs, shorten timelines, and expand access to life-saving therapies.
NSAI isn’t some future technology. For leaders willing to seize this moment, NSAI offers a strategy, a lens, and a platform for transformation. The opportunity is nothing less than redefining how an enterprise tackles its most intractable challenges, and in doing so, shapes the world in which we live.
This article originally appeared in The World Economic Forum Stories. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/12/neurosymbolic-ai-real-world-outcomes/
Neurosymbolic AI (NSAI) uncovers complex patterns beyond traditional analysis, enabling smarter decisions across industries. With no hallucinations, auditable workings and real-world outcomes, NSAI has the power to transform enterprises and accelerate discoveries, making it a strategic tool for leaders in today’s complex environments.
