4 Minute Read

You Are More Than a Prompt, and Your Company Needs More Than a LLM

Published on
Dec 11, 2023
by
Ben Van Roo
Yurts summary

We see a daily set of Generative AI press releases and a gazillion GenAI tweets and LI posts. We hear constant calls for regulation, testimonies, and forecasts of massive economic disruption. New GenAI models, new acronyms, new companies. The dizzying pace of it all is exciting and offers promising breakthroughs, yet makes it difficult to understand the opportunity versus the noise.

Amid the excitement, buzz, and frothiness that is GenAI in 2023, there’s an elephant in the room that has not yet been addressed: Enterprises are barely using it. GenAI is not driving major activities across the Fortune 2000 – it’s not being assigned to critical workflows or driving real revenue generating functions.

For the majority of the global workforce, GenAI has had and may continue to have little impact on your day-to-day, and their careers. Several early studies have demonstrated the promise of GenAI on productivity. But how far off are we from making you better at your job? What about helping advance your career? In most use cases for knowledge work, the answer is ‘not yet’ or at the earliest, relatively soon. For many enterprise use cases, GenAI is not yet tied to the information and knowledge you care about. It’s not configurable across the products you work with each day. It does not know your tone and style.

Why? Enterprises think about privacy, they have their own IT infrastructure, and access rights to data. There are established workflows and applications, budgets for compute, petabytes of corporate data and knowledge. The current mode of engaging with LLMs via solutions via chat interface behind a periodically trained model, doesn’t really work at scale in enterprises. 

A new generation of platforms will be required to bridge the gap. Companies like Walmart, Toyota, and Ally Bank have announced prototyping platforms for their organizations – built from scratch. Yurts believes most companies are better served allocating key resources to leveraging GenAI within the enterprise as opposed to the evolving plumbing and wiring that enables enterprise GenAI. Let us be your enabling partner.

We want to connect people to their best work; wherever they go, whatever they do.

We believe corporate knowledge and productivity go hand in hand, and that GenAI can be both a tool to better organize corporate knowledge and act as an accelerant that makes organizations more productive.

We have and will continue to focus our energy on three main ideas:

  1. You are in control of your experience and your journey – GenAI can’t be just about prompts and chats in one-off third party applications with limited or no context of your job, workflows, or enterprise. Your work moves with you across applications and has context to all the data you care about. We’ve built Yurts for your work, and how you do work. With native connections to data and applications, our assistants go with you. You can use our interfaces or any of the common apps you already use and have secure access to all of your data. In addition, you can share knowledge and schedule workflows and activities.
  1. All of your workflows matter – Key workflows within and across sales, marketing, product, engineering, and management provides organizational value. Yurts plugs in and augments these enterprise workflows that live within and beyond corporate organizations. Moreover, we built Yurts to quickly connect to and power questions and workflows that are top of mind – think things like general benefits, healthcare, and onboarding.
  1. Our platform is enterprise-ready and can evolve with your organization – For over a year, we’ve focused our efforts on critical but less buzzy aspects of enterprise AI, making it easy to securely deploy for IT organizations. Yurts can be deployed privately and securely in any environment –with  strong privacy and security controls, optimized for costs in numerous ways, and  easy to deploy.

Simply put, we’ve oriented our objectives around helping enterprises and workers quickly realize quantifiable value with LLMs, and power their best work in all they do.

Together, we’ve been working on these problems for a long time…

You don’t have to dig too far into our About page to see a team with shared values and shared history. We have built companies together and have built language-based AI products and services across industries — from banking to CPG, education to national security. We know the challenges of deploying these tools at scale and making models safe and secure for the most mission critical use cases.

…and we’re grateful to those who have joined us on our journey.

We’re honored to have Manish Patel and the Nava Ventures team lead our Series A. Manish, Freddie, Rollins, and the team share a common perspective on the opportunity and approach, and we’re grateful to have them as partners.

With many of our roots in the Public Sector and the Department of Defense, we’re thrilled to have Ross Fubini and XYZ Ventures join us. His experience working with Palantir, Anduril, and a host of other Defense Tech companies made him a great fit for how we plan on having a strong presence in serving the people that serve our country.

We’re grateful to Robin Vasan of Mango Capital, James Cham of Bloomberg Beta, and Tim Chen of Essence VC for being there well before we incorporated, funding our pre-seed, and continuing to show support with our Series A.

When we started Yurts in 2022 – before the hype of LLMs and the fever pitch of GenAI – we knew the potential of LLMs in enterprise, so we focused our efforts on the real roadblocks in making it accessible. We are excited with our progress to date, and still have a long way to go. Interested in a demo let's connect or check out our open roles if you want to join the adventure.

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written by
Ben Van Roo
CEO and Founder
4 Minute Read