Safe AI agents in high-stakes industries
Our recent presentation at an AI Agents in Finance workshop
In December, the team at multiply.ai invited us to the workshop they hosted on AI Agents at the Google London office.
The full presentation was recorded, and is embedded below. Key highlights:
How we design our agentic systems at Gradient Labs, with our key principle: “what would a human do?” When a person is working on a task, there is a lot that we do not document & take for granted. At Gradient Labs, we bake this implicit expertise into our agent so that it does not need to be instructed down to the last detail.
What is the most basic thing that you need to get right? Having an AI agent that knows what to do when it receives (or, critically, doesn’t receive) signals from the outside world. The Gradient Labs agent handles this seamlessly by being built as a finite state machine.
Is retrieval-augmented generation enough? The promise of RAG hides two important problems: majority of a company’s knowledge is undocumented, and it is rare for “search & reply” to lead to good outcomes. At Gradient Labs, we’ve built a suite of agents that can learn from a company’s historical data.
What are AI agent tools? Empowering an AI agent to use tools (APIs) unlocks opportunities for end-to-end automation, but if you wouldn’t allow an employee to access all of the tools in your company, how should an AI agent do so safely? At Gradient Labs, our agent’s choices restrict which tools it can or cannot use.
How can you prevent both common AI Agent mistakes and industry-specific ones? At Gradient Labs, we guard against both—no outcome is safer than a wrong one.
🚢 If you would like a deeper dive, I gave a more technical version of this presentation at the MLOps Agents in Production event.