William Tunstall-Pedoe’s venture UnlikelyAI is creating a platform that insurance companies can use to automate their processes using the technology

One of the inventors of Amazon’s Alexa has proven he can make AI trustworthy — at least when it comes to assessing valid insurance claims.

William Tunstall-Pedoe originally developed the technology that became the retail giant’s voice assistant service and his new venture, called UnlikelyAI, has an even more ambitious goal.

“We are tackling a problem that is potentially bigger than Alexa, which is making AI trustworthy,” he said.

His company has combined data-driven learning models, known as neural networks or large language models (LLMs), with rule-based systems, called symbolic reasoning, to create a platform that companies can use to automate their processes using AI.

“LLMs have amazing capabilities and are absolutely transformative but when enterprises try to apply LLMs to problems in their business it very often doesn’t work,” said Tunstall-Pedoe, 56. “A lot of pilots don’t really succeed. It is a black box, isn’t explainable, and it is inconsistent. We are developing fundamental technologies to tackle that problem.”

UnlikelyAI has completed a pilot with SBS Insurance Services, which saw the insurer automate 40 per cent of its claims handling with 99 per cent accuracy. This compares with a rate of accuracy for the same task that is typically around 52 per cent when just using LLMs, the company said. UnlikelyAI’s system also provides an audit trail for all its decisions, so they can be explained if queried by customers or regulators.

“We are building a collection of technologies that bring trust to AI applications. Whenever enterprises are using AI to do business critical things, where the cost of getting it wrong is high, we can help,” said Tunstall-Pedoe.

“In the insurance world we are ingesting the policies, which are natural language. We create a symbolic representation of it, which then gives you that really high accuracy when doing the claims process against it.”

He sold the technology that became a key part of Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant in 2012. It originated in a startup he founded in Cambridge called True Knowledge, which became known as Evi after it developed a voice assistant, a few months after Apple launched Siri.

“We were competing directly with the biggest company in the world as a 30-person Cambridge startup. We had millions of downloads very quickly and every big company that was trying to figure out its response to the existence of Siri were talking to us. At the end of 2012 we had two acquisition offers and we chose to get bought by Amazon.”

Tunstall-Pedoe joined the Amazon team to develop Alexa, working on an initiative under the Project D codename, and launching it in the US in 2014. He left Amazon in 2016 and has since invested in over 100 start-ups and mentored entrepreneurs. He founded UnlikelyAI in 2020 and has since raised $20 million from investors including Amadeus Capital Partners, Octopus Ventures, and Cambridge Innovation Capital.

Tunstall-Pedoe said UnlikelyAI’s “goal is to create AI that is always right”.

“When it gives you an answer you can always trust it. It can always provide a fully auditable explanation for any business decision that is made. And it will be consistent, and not breach your trust by giving a different answer each time you use it.”

“Our primary customers are high stakes industries, where a business decision has really big consequences if it’s wrong. Medicine is a good example. Finance is also very important, or any industry that is regulated. If you breach regulations you can be fined.”