Introducing Vanguard: Adarga's AI Capability Accelerator

Director of AI, Dr David Green, discusses how cutting-edge AI innovation, coupled with hyper-rapid prototyping techniques, keeps Adarga and its customers at the commercial cutting edge.

Navigating fast-paced technological change: adapt or fall behind

The current pace of technological change is relentless. AI is growing in power and sophistication in unprecedented ways. The world is evolving towards an inflection point where traditional approaches to software development are no longer able to keep up. It is likely that in the near-term new technology, such as chatbot-type AI (for example ChatGPT), will increasingly be combined with both new and extant algorithmic capabilities.

As this occurs, there will be a dramatic increase in the power of available AI capabilities. The entire suite of human historical cognitive developments, encapsulated as software, will become available to powerful AIs. At the same time, because of the nature of software tool development, working with AI is highly democratised. Collections of open-source and/or very easily accessible software libraries are the predominant mode by which people produce a lot of commercial software. This means that the field is evolving ever more quickly. The commercial risk carried by companies in this environment of uncertainty is putting pressure on slow-moving development processes. Companies face a stark choice - to adapt and innovate to these new conditions or to be passed by.

Introducing Adarga Vanguard: turning AI innovation into real-world application at speed

To maintain our position at the forefront of commercial AI developments, we have developed a program to unleash the full force of our understanding of AI, technology, and the changing nature of software. The core process behind Vanguard is simple: Understand, Develop, Deploy. Taking forward the spirit of highly innovative incubation programs such as Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, Vanguard allows Adarga to carry out science-led innovation at the speed of relevance.

Not only does it act as our own internal technology incubator, but importantly, Vanguard offers multiple commercialisation and productisation of solutions to enable customers to benefit from our rapid AI innovation services to solve their real-world challenges. This is made possible as it’s built on top of Adarga‘s Knowledge Platform (the AKP) - our proprietary ecosystem of 35+ models created for information intelligence applications.

The Vanguard AI Capability Accelerator focuses on these three core pillars:

Accelerating and de-risking product feature delivery.
Showcasing advanced technologies to influence roadmap direction.
Enabling hyper-rapid prototyping for internal and external development.

By unlocking the full potential of the AKP and its proprietary GenAI and NLP capabilities, Vanguard rapidly transforms ambitious ideas into tangible solutions. Its sophisticated MLOps pipeline ensures seamless integration, providing deployment options to enable the conversion of concepts into real-world applications at speed.

Vanguard in action

As outlined above, Vanguard is not only being used to supercharge our internal AI development but has been used as the basis for many rapid AI innovation projects for customers. Some examples include an AI-powered scenario planning tool for a defence customer, and a low-code tool for the fusion of multiple large-scale data sets for National Security use cases.

In this blog, we have provided a few highlights of our work to date.

Agentic AI: A paradigm shift at the forefront of AI

Adarga’s RFI Assistant is an Agentic AI system designed to transform the way intelligence analysts respond to RFIs (Requests for Information). You can read more about it here.

The concept of an agentic workflow is a radical departure from traditional AI processes. Unlike conventional models that generate outputs in a single pass, agentic workflows involve iterative, interactive AI development where AI agents engage in self-reflective processes, all while enabling human oversight and control at every step.

Powered by Adarga’s proprietary AI technologies, the RFI Assistant uses a sophisticated agentic workflow built on top of the Adarga Knowledge Platform (AKP), using our own carefully crafted custom agents - each optimised for a specific phase of the RFI response process.

The agents behind the Adarga RFI Assistant are equipped with a range of AI-driven capabilities from the AKP, geared for information intelligence use cases. Features such as document searches, entity extraction, event identification, and relationship mapping are unlocked for the agents, enabling the RFI responses to be compiled using highly relevant information.

These agents are further enhanced by Adarga’s deep geopolitical and military domain knowledge. Specialist agents, such as Middle East, Eastern Europe and Asia Experts, have an unprecedented ability to understand and interpret information about the world. The system is designed to always keep human analysts firmly in control. It allows for these RFIs to be responded to in minutes, whereas previously, these responses would take hours or even days.

Next Gen Search: go beyond keyword and string matching

Another of Vanguard’s successes was the creation of Adarga’s advanced “Next Gen Search” capability which you can read more about here. Adarga’s next-gen search is an advanced information retrieval system that delivers answers that go beyond simple keyword matching to include related concepts, ideas, and connections.

Internal prototypes making use of vector database technologies were built and put in front of our in-house analysts to allow them to evaluate and assess the quality of results.

Once the idea was proven, a deeper process of technology selection and evaluation of the machine learning-powered search tool was adopted to migrate the capability out of the Vanguard incubator and into Vantage, the company’s flagship product. It showed a 25% improvement in search accuracy compared to our previous methods.

This innovative search capability has already proven its value.

An Adarga product manager noted:

"Our advanced search technology enabled a commercial customer to identify adversarial sources discussing a company c-level executive - a piece of intelligence they were unaware of and that they acted on immediately."

Report Generation: Human-Machine Collaboration

Vanguard has also played a pivotal role in developing Adarga’s soon-to-be launched human-machine teaming report generation tool. The need for such a feature was understood by several customer stakeholders and it was clear that this was a critical direction for the future of our Vantage product offering. It enables insights identified in Vantage to be automatically generated into a report format, with built-in processes for human controls.

Within days, the accelerator helped create an initial version, which immediately empowered our in-house analysts to streamline their workflows. Different Large Language Model (LLM) configurations, different user interfaces, and even new technologies relating to document tagging were tested and developed to deliver these prototypes. Internal testing by our analysts was used to refine the initial vision. Iterative enhancements transformed it into a core feature of the Adarga Vantage product, underscoring Vanguard’s ability to drive breakthroughs at remarkable speeds.

Rapid prototyping offerings for customers: expanding Vanguard's commercial horizons

Adarga Vanguard is as much an external accelerator as it is an internal one. We work with customers to deliver impact and value via our commercial Vanguard offerings. Vanguard bridges the gap between innovation and practical application, delivering a diverse range of opportunities to meet present and future customer needs in four core ways:

Adarga Services: can help with rapid prototyping designed to address real-world challenges with speed and precision.
Predefined Tools and Capabilities: Deployable tools like the RFI Assistant are available for use, empowering customers with ready-to-use solutions.
R&D: Bringing the forefront of cutting-edge research directly into the hands of users.
Deployment: Simplifying AI adoption through streamlined processes that eliminate unnecessary complexity.

Conclusion

By harnessing the power of the AKP and the latest developments in AI, Vanguard allows the value of the most cutting-edge AI advances to be realised for customers immediately.

The uncertainty that the rapid rate of technological evolution has brought into the world of software development has made it feel almost impossible to stay at the forefront of new technologies. Vanguard, however, is allowing Adarga to carry out innovation at an unprecedented pace by harnessing the power of its Knowledge Platform - our ecosystem of AI models and cutting-edge capabilities designed for information intelligence.

As an AI Capability Accelerator, Vanguard brings new technologies to bear faster than ever before, not only providing internal innovation but enabling the value of the latest developments in AI to be realised for customers immediately.

Vanguard has now become a means by which we ensure we are at, and will remain at, the commercial cutting edge.

To find out more about how our AI capabilities and services can address your specific business challenges, get in touch here.