Language, Graphs, and AI in Industry
Over the past 5 years, news about AI has been filled with amazing research – at first focused on graph neural networks (GNNs) and more recently about large language models (LLMs). Understand that business tends to use connected data – networks, graphs – whether you’re untangling supply networks in Manufacturing, working on drug discovery for Pharma, or mitigating fraud in Finance. Starting from supplier agreements, bill of materials, internal process docs, sales contracts, etc., there’s a graph inside nearly every business process, one that is defined by language. This talk addresses how to leverage both natural language and graph technologies together for AI applications in industry. We’ll look at how LLMs get used to build and augment graphs, and conversely how graph data gets used to ground LLMs for generative AI use cases in industry – where a kind of “virtuous cycle” is emerging for feedback loops based on graph data. Our team has been engaged, on the one hand, with enterprise use cases in manufacturing. On the other hand we’ve worked as intermediaries between research teams funded by enterprise and open source projects needed by enterprise – particularly in the open source ecosystem for AI models. Also, there are caveats; this work is not simple. Translating from latest research into production-ready code is especially complex and expensive. Let’s examine caveats which other teams should understand, and look toward practical examples.
