AI Agents: A New Era Of AI Integration

What are AI Agents?

An artificial intelligence (AI) agent refers to a system or program capable of autonomously performing tasks on behalf of a user or another system by designing its workflow and utilizing available tools. Autonomous AI agents can understand and interpret customers’ questions using natural language and translate them into business solutions.

AI journey

In recent years AI has gained a lot of momentum. Predictive analytics make the first wave of AI. Industries entered into 2nd wave of AI as generative AI. Now we are entering into 3rd wave of AI-autonomous agents. AI autonomous agents are creating a new horizon of AI implementation and AI strategy. AI autonomous agents are creating a paradigm shift that will transform how we execute our tasks and business processes daily.

How do AI agents work?

AI agents are autonomous in their decision-making process, but it require goals and environments defined by humans. Here are a few steps to define an AI agent’s goals.

  1. Data preparation and data collection — AI agents start with gathering data from all sources including customer data, transaction data, and social media. These data help to understand context and user-defined goals for AI agents.
  2. Decision-making – AI agents analyze the collected data based on machine learning models to identify patterns and decision-making.
  3. Action execution – Once a decision is made, AI agents can execute the business actions. This action includes customer queries, processing documents, executing any process, or any complex user flow.
  4. Learning and Adoption – AI agents continuously learn from each interaction, refining algorithms to improve accuracy and effectiveness. AI agents keep updating their knowledge base and enhancing their models.

How are AI agents helping organizations?

  1. Agents become building blocks that will engage with data and services on your behalf.
  2. Developers will be freed from repetitive coding tasks as AI agents get this work done.
  3. The organization will monitor and secure a network of agents in a single-agent control plane.

How AI agents will be enabling AI integration?

An AI agents provide an AI unification layer which enables your integration with AI LLMs. This feature is categorized into 3 ways.

Easy: Almost no-code development and leveraging existing skills.

Flexible: It enables you to connect multiple LLMS and switch at any time into any model. It also allows us to connect multiple databases and leverage AI innovation as they arrive.

Manageable: Deploy your AI building blocks anywhere and secure these building blocks. Easy to control from one place and reduce operating cost.

AI autonomous agents in MuleSoft

The MuleSoft Solution Engineering Team is working on an open-source AI agents project as MAC(MuleSoft AI Chain). This powerful AI agent tool can connect multiple LLMs and models to provide a unification layer for LLMs. MAC connector enables speech-to-text and text-to-speech for multiple LLMs/model providers. MAC connector leverages existing MuleSoft skills and API knowledge to integrate with any client systems. You can secure and manage this AI agent through API Manager.

Types of AI agents

Scheduled — Run in a defined window and are completely autonomous

Composed — Agents that can be triggered via APIs to be used, e.g., on a portal, as part of integrations, data assessment

Event-Driven — Agents that can be triggered on Events to service distributed applications and consumers.

Batched — Agents that process a large set of data and distribute it intelligently to multiple consumers.

Please reach out to us if you would like to know more about AI agent and integration with your systems.

Generative AI (GenAI): Security

Generative AI (GenAI): Security

Generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) is a new buzzword across the industries. Generative AI is an artificial intelligence technology that can produce various types of content, including text, imagery, audio, and synthetic data.

All organizations are investing large amounts of their budget in GenAI technology. Recently Amazon completed a $4 billion investment in generative AI development. As per a recent study barely scratching the Generative AI use case and opportunity.

Before implementing any Generative AI solution make sure you completely understand the organization’s business problem to implement Gen AI solution, because any generative AI solution takes a lot of money, time, and brain power.

Evolution of LLMs

Generative AI has just blown up within the last year or two years, but it has been around for decades. Generative AI is based on large language models (LLM).  LLM has been evolving for a while technically five to ten years approx. All companies (like AWS, Microsoft, and Open AI) are presenting their standard based on their business requirements. Here is the evolution story of LLMs & GenAI.

AI Attacks

There are four types of AI attacks.

  1. Poisoning – This AI attack can lead to the loss of reputation and capital. This is a classic example of thrill-seekers and hacktivists injecting malicious content which subsequently disrupts the retraining process.
  2. Inference – This AI attack can result in the leakage of sensitive information. This attack aims to probe the machine learning model with different input data and weigh the output.
  3. Evasion – This AI attack can harm physical safety. This type of attack is usually carried out by Hacktivists aiming to get the product of a competitive company down and has the potential to seriously harm the physical safety of people.
  4. Extraction – This AI attack can lead to insider threats or cybercriminals. Based on this the attacker can extract the original model and create a stolen model to find evasion cases and fool the original model.

Type of AI Malware

  • Black Mamba – Black Mamba utilizes a benign executable that reaches out to a high-reputation API (OpenAI) at runtime, so it can return synthesized, malicious code needed to steal an infected user’s keystrokes. It has the below properties.
    • ChatGPT Polymorphic Malware
    • Dynamically Generates Code
    • Unique Malware code
  • Deep Locker – The Deep Locker class of malware stands in stark contrast to existing evasion techniques used by malware seen in the wild. It hides its malicious payload in benign carrier applications, such as video conference software, to avoid detection by most antivirus and malware scanners. It has the below properties.
    • Targeted identification
    • Logic detonation Mechanism
    • Facial and voice recognition
  • MalGAN – Generative Adversarial Networks serve as the foundation of Malware GAN and are used to create synthetic malware samples. For Mal-GAN’s complex design to function, it is made up of three essential parts: the generator, substitute detector, and malware detection system based on machine learning. It has the below properties.
    • Generative Adversarial Malware
    • Bypass ML-based Detections
    • Feed-forward Neural Networks

AI Security Threats

  • Deepfake Attacks
  • Mapping and Stealing AI Models
  • Spear Phishing (Deep Phishing)
  • Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs)
  • DDoS and Scanning of the Internet.
  • Data poisoning AI Models
  • PassGAN and MalGAN
  • Auto Generation of Exploit code
  • Ransom Negotiation Automation
  • Social Engineering

AI Security Defense Strategy

As we learned in AI several AI malware and threats are impacting different parts of the AI ecosystem. Our AI must be smart enough that it detects its threats and mitigates risk. ML-based malware detectors detect risk and generate insights into its severity. Here are a few approaches should implement to protect your AI systems.

  • Intelligent Automation
    • Automated response and Mitigation
    • Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) extraction and correlation
    • Behavioral and anomaly detection
  • Precision Approach
    • High Accuracy and Precision
    • Identify, Understand, and Neutralize
    • Prioritize Risk
  • Define the Area for defense
    • Identify the most vulnerable area.
    • Apply a broad spectrum of defense.
    • System resiliency

AI involvement in security

  • Malware detection – AI systems help prevent phishing, malware, and other malicious activities, ensuring a high-security posture and analyzing any unusual behavior.
  • Breach risk prediction – Identify the most vulnerable system and protect against any data leak.
  • Prioritize critical defense – AI-powered risk analysis can produce incident summaries for high-fidelity alerts and automate incident responses, accelerating alert investigations.
  • Correlating attack patterns – AI models can help balance security with user experience by analyzing the risk of each login attempt and verifying users through behavioral data, simplifying access for verified users
  • Adaptive response – AI model automated response and generate an alert if the system identifies any threats. This creates the first layer of security defense.
  • Applied Machine learning – AI models are self-train. If models identify any new risk pattern apply new security models to all protected systems.

ChatGPT: A Intro & Company Use-Case

The internet is full of buzz about the new AI based chatbot, chatGPT. ChatGPT reminds me of the early days of  google, how google came and changed our internet search forever. We were using lycos search engine but google gave a new definition of search engine. Similarly I am seeing chatGPT is trying to define our search which is based on AI and AI models. It is coming as a new disruptive technology. Suddenly google is looking like old school.

Generative Pretrained Transformer 3 (GPT-3)  from OpenAI, is the main component for Jasper.ai and other cloud based content writing, chatbot and machine learning applications. GPT-3 was first publicly released by OpenAI on June 11, 2020.  GPT-3 is based on the concept of natural language processing (NLP) tasks and “generative pretraining”, which involves predicting the next token in a context of up to 2,048 tokens. 

GPT-3 is based on Large language models (LLMs). Large language models (LLMs) are AI tools that can read, summarize, and translate text. They can predict words and craft sentences that reflect how humans write and speak.Three popular and powerful large language models include Microsoft ’s Turing NLG, DeepMind’s Gopher, and OpenAI ’s GPT-3.

ChatGPT was first publicly released by OpenAI on November 30, 2022 based on the GPT-3 framework. Initially developed as part of the GPT-3 research program, ChatGPT was built on top of the powerful GPT-3.5 language model to specifically address natural language processing tasks that involve customer service chat interactions.

OpenAI’s Chat GPT3 has demonstrated the capability of performing professional tasks such as writing software code and preparing legal documents. It has also shown a remarkable ability to automate some of the skills of highly compensated knowledge workers in general. ChatGPT has immense potential for ecommerce customer experience automation. ChatGPT allows customers to personalized shopping and fully automated 24 x 7 customer service on-demand.

In spite of chatGPT buzzwords, ability to content writing and customer service on-demand, I am little careful to use this technology for my business. I tested a few use-cases in chatGPT. It is working fine with some simple use-case and problem solving. But as soon as I added a few more variables to my problem, the chatGPT response was not correct.

Here is screenshot from ChatGPT for my problem and solution from chatGPT

The problem shown above chatGPT directly calculated from equation and response came as 5 min.

In chatGPT’s response it is not calculating a person’s waiting time in the queue. 

So from above question right answer would be

Average Waiting Time = Average Processing Time x Utilization / (1-Utilization).

Average Waiting Time = 5 x (5/6) / (1 – 5/6) = 25 minutes

So, the correct answer is 25 minutes waiting in line. If we add the 5 minutes at the kiosk, we obtain a total of 30 minutes.

So from the above issue, I would like to highlight a few points if your company is trying to implement any ChatGPT solution.

  1. Does the ChatGPT AI model is configured based on your company use case?
  2. Do you have enough historical data to run and test AI based chatGPT LLM models?
  3. ChatGPT runs on the big model like LLM model. Big models incur a big cost, and LLM are expensive.
  4. Since ChatGPT runs on a big model (LLM), ChatGPT  needs to overcome performance constraints.

Keep an eye out for GPT-4, which may be released as early as the first half of 2023. This next generation of GPT may be better at their results and more realistic. 

RPA, BOTS, AI and API

In today’s competitive markets, industries face many challenges in order to remain successful. These include staying ahead of the competition, understanding customers need and preferences, and providing a high level of service that will make customers happy.

Here are few challenges for current industries

  1. Resolve customer issues ASAP
  2. Collect and qualify customer information
  3. Easily connect to business process
  4. Enable business new features quickly.

In current business requirements 90% of organizations see increased demand for automation from business teams, due to that 95% of IT leaders are prioritizing automation. 

Automation is a critical component of digital transformation and business success. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) bots are at the forefront of this revolution, providing businesses with an automated solution to optimize their processes while improving customer experiences. RPA bots can be used in many areas such as data entry, document processing and workflow management; they automate repetitive tasks that would otherwise take up valuable resources from human employees. This automation not only increases efficiency but also reduces costs associated with manual labor, allowing companies to focus on more pressing issues like innovation or collaboration between departments. By utilizing intelligent bots powered by artificial intelligence (AI), companies can further streamline operations and provide customers with immediate feedback on requests or inquiries in real time without manual intervention from employees. Additionally, natural language processing (NLP) capabilities allow chatbots used in websites or apps to respond quickly and accurately when communicating with customers.

Using NLP, Bots can decipher specific sentences or words customers type and associate them to an intent. NLP provides insights by analyzing past chat transcripts to identify common customer utterances or phrases (such as order status, account information, password reset, logging an issue, etc.) that the Bot can use to take action. A predictive model for bots to understand intent and take action called intent model. The intent model is made up of intents and utterances.

APIs , NLP and AI are the essential components for Bots. Once an intent model from NLP identifies action then Bots call APIs. APIs help to execute tasks from the backend system for Bots. Suppose if users are looking for order status from bots and APIs are not responding on time it will fail the whole Bots purpose. So APIs are one of the key components for Bots.

APIs streamline Bots tasks and automated any process/tasks for any team. Bots and APIs empower business and IT teams to collaborate with ease and break silos in every step of their automation journey. Enable end-to-end automation at scale Reuse and compose RPA securely.