A new artificial intelligence (AI) called Tessa, from the innovative applied research lab General Agency, is revolutionizing AI workflow automation. Human staff trains AI to handle business processes that used to require their attention by simply sharing their screens with this custom AI solution.
“Tessa is doing what AI was always supposed to do: automating the rote, repetitive, and routine tasks so that humans can focus on what matters,” says Mohammed Nasir, co-founder and CEO of General Agency. “So far, workflow automation tools, while they are useful, have added a different kind of work in terms of setting up the automations themselves. Tessa solves that by making it dead simple to get the job done.”
Unlike previous AI-powered resources, Tessa can learn like a human and even take initiative.
The limitations of previous AI agents and AI automation
Previous workflow automation tools required technical users who think like systems engineers. “People need to translate their workflow into these composable building blocks that can each do one step of the task,” Nasir explains. “The inaccessibility of these AI tools is evident in the fact that the vast majority of users of no-code workflow automation tools, have a technical background.”
Previously, robotic process automation (RPA) tools have also relied on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which meant that sectors and occupations without them were left behind. Additionally, traditional automation and AI-powered workflow tools often struggle to handle complex workflows. For instance, they could not launch a browser, log into applications, click through them to determine what should be done, and then do those specific things.
“Until now, AIs have only been able to talk about things, not take action,” Nasir says. “We’ve recently started seeing AI platforms pop up that go beyond natural language processing and enable actions to be taken. But the missing piece is that these AI models cannot learn from experience. You either have to collect a ton of data and fine-tune the model yourself, which requires a concerted engineering effort. Or one can spend a ton of time on prompt engineering, which only works to a certain extent.”
Enter Tessa, the new AI-powered workflow automation platform that solves these problems and more.
Meet Tessa: The new AI workflow automation platform
Tessa is designed to enable non-technical people to automate their work with generative AI technologies. Imagine being given an assistant who can learn from observing you and gradually take over the more mundane aspects of your job. That’s how Tessa’s intelligent automation works.
“Tessa learns like you’re onboarding another human worker,” Nasir says. “All you have to do is share your screen and allow her to watch as you go about your workday.”
This new approach to process automation represents a significant leap forward in how people can utilize AI.
How AI workflow tool Tessa optimizes business processes
“The ability to use a browser and learn from a simple demonstration results in a pretty big unlock in terms of interacting with legacy portals and internal systems that do not have APIs,” Nasir says. “The most exciting part about Tessa is that not only can you automate a linear, step-by-step process, but also you can also automate decisions, leading to branches or loops. Tessa, to an extent, effectively automates decision-making.”
Just like a human assistant, Tessa is capable of understanding how different conditions on applications, such as data sets, spreadsheets, and written documents, influence the work that should be done, even on other applications. It moves between the various pieces of software necessary for business operations — whether cloud-based or not — and looks for key indicators, accurately making decisions for the next step based on them.
“AI agents are only useful if the system meets the data where it lives,” Nasir says. “With Tessa, repetitive work that involved using browser-only portals, such as in healthcare, insurance, supply chain management, hospitality, and more, now has an automation solution.”
Tessa effectively levels up machine learning through a whole new kind of architecture.
A new kind of machine learning
“The key innovation at the heart of Tessa is memory, and more specifically, the efficient storage and accurate recall of memory,” Nasir explains. “Our novel architecture gathers all of the input information coming from the user or from observations of the environment and stores it in a new graph-based architecture.”
Due to her massive memory, Tessa not only remembers seemingly minute details effectively, but can also learn quicker than previous AI technologies.
“This architecture allows our system to learn from just one data point, as opposed to the hundreds (if not thousands) of data points required for fine-tuning,” Nasir says. “What’s even better is that, even if we have a million examples, any new examples that come in don’t cause us to forget what we remembered early on. In technical circles, this is called ‘continual learning,’ and our novel architecture enables just that.”
Tessa: The forefront of artificial intelligence
While AI-powered tools and business process automations have long been lauded for their ability to automate repetitive tasks, streamline procedures, and ease bottlenecks, Tessa is designed to function as closely as possible to the way humans think and work. Moreover, Tessa takes the next step by putting the power of AI into the hands of ordinary people.
With the birth of Tessa, the next generation of workflow automation software is dawning.
