Orby is developing AI agents tailored for enterprise use

AI “agents” are generative AI models that can perform actions autonomously, like copying info from an email and pasting it into a spreadsheet, and have been hailed as productivity superchargers. That might be a bit premature, given models’ tendency to make mistakes. But at least a few founders (and analysts and investors) seem convinced that agents are the next frontier in generative AI.

Bella Liu and William Lu are two such founders. Their company, Orby AI, is building a generative AI platform that attempts to automate a range of different business workflows, including workflows that involve data entry, documents processing and forms validation.

Lots of startups offer tools to automate repetitive, monotonous back-office business processes (see Parabola, Tines, Sam Altman-backed Induced AI and Tektonic AI, to name a few). Incumbents, too, like Automation Anywhere and UiPath, have moved to embrace AI to try to maintain pace with the generative AI competition.

But Liu and Lu claim that Orby’s tech stands out for its ability to learn and act on workflows in real time and to understand the patterns and relationships within an enterprise’s unstructured data.

“Orby’s platform observes how workers do their work in order to automatically create automations for complex tasks that require some level of reasoning and understanding,” Liu, Orby’s CEO, explained. “An AI agent installed on a worker’s computer effectively watches, learns and generates automations, adapting the model as it learns more.”