Ravi Bommakanti, Chief Technology Officer at App Orchid, leads the company’s mission to help enterprises operationalize AI across applications and decision-making processes. App Orchid’s flagship product, Easy Answers™, enables users to interact with data using natural language to generate AI-powered dashboards, insights, and recommended actions.
The platform integrates structured and unstructured data—including real-time inputs and employee knowledge—into a predictive data fabric that supports strategic and operational decisions. With in-memory Big Data technology and a user-friendly interface, App Orchid streamlines AI adoption through rapid deployment, low-cost implementation, and minimal disruption to existing systems.
Let’s start with the big picture—what does “agentic AI” mean to you, and how is it different from traditional AI systems?
Agentic AI represents a fundamental shift from the static execution typical of traditional AI systems to dynamic orchestration. To me, it’s about moving from rigid, pre-programmed systems to autonomous, adaptable problem-solvers that can reason, plan, and collaborate.
What truly sets agentic AI apart is its ability to leverage the distributed nature of knowledge and expertise. Traditional AI often operates within fixed boundaries, following predetermined paths. Agentic systems, however, can decompose complex tasks, identify the right specialized agents for sub-tasks—potentially discovering and leveraging them through agent registries—and orchestrate their interaction to synthesize a solution. This concept of agent registries allows organizations to effectively ‘rent’ specialized capabilities as needed, mirroring how human expert teams are assembled, rather than being forced to build or own every AI function internally.
So, instead of monolithic systems, the future lies in creating ecosystems where specialized agents can be dynamically composed and coordinated – much like a skilled project manager leading a team – to address complex and evolving business challenges effectively.
How is Google Agentspace accelerating the adoption of agentic AI across enterprises, and what’s App Orchid’s role in this ecosystem?
Google Agentspace is a significant accelerator for enterprise AI adoption. By providing a unified foundation to deploy and manage intelligent agents connected to various work applications, and leveraging Google’s powerful search and models like Gemini, Agentspace enables companies to transform siloed information into actionable intelligence through a common interface.
App Orchid acts as a vital semantic enablement layer within this ecosystem. While Agentspace provides the agent infrastructure and orchestration framework, our Easy Answers platform tackles the critical enterprise challenge of making complex data understandable and accessible to agents. We use an ontology-driven approach to build rich knowledge graphs from enterprise data, complete with business context and relationships – precisely the understanding agents need.
This creates a powerful synergy: Agentspace provides the robust agent infrastructure and orchestration capabilities, while App Orchid provides the deep semantic understanding of complex enterprise data that these agents require to operate effectively and deliver meaningful business insights. Our collaboration with the Google Cloud Cortex Framework is a prime example, helping customers drastically reduce data preparation time (up to 85%) while leveraging our platform’s industry-leading 99.8% text-to-SQL accuracy for natural language querying. Together, we empower organizations to deploy agentic AI solutions that truly grasp their business language and data intricacies, accelerating time-to-value.
What are real-world barriers companies face when adopting agentic AI, and how does App Orchid help them overcome these?
The primary barriers we see revolve around data quality, the challenge of evolving security standards – particularly ensuring agent-to-agent trust – and managing the distributed nature of enterprise knowledge and agent capabilities.
Data quality remains the bedrock issue. Agentic AI, like any AI, provides unreliable outputs if fed poor data. App Orchid tackles this foundationally by creating a semantic layer that contextualizes disparate data sources. Building on this, our unique crowdsourcing features within Easy Answers engage business users across the organization—those who understand the data’s meaning best—to collaboratively identify and address data gaps and inconsistencies, significantly improving reliability.
Security presents another critical hurdle, especially as agent-to-agent communication becomes common, potentially spanning internal and external systems. Establishing robust mechanisms for agent-to-agent trust and maintaining governance without stifling necessary interaction is key. Our platform focuses on implementing security frameworks designed for these dynamic interactions.
Finally, harnessing distributed knowledge and capabilities effectively requires advanced orchestration. App Orchid leverages concepts like the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which is increasingly pivotal. This enables the dynamic sourcing of specialized agents from repositories based on contextual needs, facilitating fluid, adaptable workflows rather than rigid, pre-defined processes. This approach aligns with emerging standards, such as Google’s Agent2Agent protocol, designed to standardize communication in multi-agent systems. We help organizations build trusted and effective agentic AI solutions by addressing these barriers.
Can you walk us through how Easy Answers™ works—from natural language query to insight generation?
Easy Answers transforms how users interact with enterprise data, making sophisticated analysis accessible through natural language. Here’s how it works:
- Connectivity: We start by connecting to the enterprise’s data sources – we support over 200 common databases and systems. Crucially, this often happens without requiring data movement or replication, connecting securely to data where it resides.
- Ontology Creation: Our platform automatically analyzes the connected data and builds a comprehensive knowledge graph. This structures the data into business-centric entities we call Managed Semantic Objects (MSOs), capturing the relationships between them.
- Metadata Enrichment: This ontology is enriched with metadata. Users provide high-level descriptions, and our AI generates detailed descriptions for each MSO and its attributes (fields). This combined metadata provides deep context about the data’s meaning and structure.
- Natural Language Query: A user asks a question in plain business language, like “Show me sales trends for product X in the western region compared to last quarter.”
- Interpretation & SQL Generation: Our NLP engine uses the rich metadata in the knowledge graph to understand the user’s intent, identify the relevant MSOs and relationships, and translate the question into precise data queries (like SQL). We achieve an industry-leading 99.8% text-to-SQL accuracy here.
- Insight Generation (Curations): The system retrieves the data and determines the most effective way to present the answer visually. In our platform, these interactive visualizations are called ‘curations’. Users can automatically generate or pre-configure them to align with specific needs or standards.
- Deeper Analysis (Quick Insights): For more complex questions or proactive discovery, users can leverage Quick Insights. This feature allows them to easily apply ML algorithms shipped with the platform to specified data fields to automatically detect patterns, identify anomalies, or validate hypotheses without needing data science expertise.
This entire process, often completed in seconds, democratizes data access and analysis, turning complex data exploration into a simple conversation.
How does Easy Answers bridge siloed data in large enterprises and ensure insights are explainable and traceable?
Data silos are a major impediment in large enterprises. Easy Answers addresses this fundamental challenge through our unique semantic layer approach.
Instead of costly and complex physical data consolidation, we create a virtual semantic layer. Our platform builds a unified logical view by connecting to diverse data sources where they reside. This layer is powered by our knowledge graph technology, which maps data into Managed Semantic Objects (MSOs), defines their relationships, and enriches them with contextual metadata. This creates a common business language understandable by both humans and AI, effectively bridging technical data structures (tables, columns) with business meaning (customers, products, sales), regardless of where the data physically lives.
Ensuring insights are trustworthy requires both traceability and explainability:
- Traceability: We provide comprehensive data lineage tracking. Users can drill down from any curations or insights back to the source data, viewing all applied transformations, filters, and calculations. This provides full transparency and auditability, crucial for validation and compliance.
- Explainability: Insights are accompanied by natural language explanations. These summaries articulate what the data shows and why it’s significant in business terms, translating complex findings into actionable understanding for a broad audience.
This combination bridges silos by creating a unified semantic view and builds trust through clear traceability and explainability.
How does your system ensure transparency in insights, especially in regulated industries where data lineage is critical?
Transparency is absolutely non-negotiable for AI-driven insights, especially in regulated industries where auditability and defensibility are paramount. Our approach ensures transparency across three key dimensions:
- Data Lineage: This is foundational. As mentioned, Easy Answers provides end-to-end data lineage tracking. Every insight, visualization, or number can be traced back meticulously through its entire lifecycle—from the original data sources, through any joins, transformations, aggregations, or filters applied—providing the verifiable data provenance required by regulators.
- Methodology Visibility: We avoid the ‘black box’ problem. When analytical or ML models are used (e.g., via Quick Insights), the platform clearly documents the methodology employed, the parameters used, and relevant evaluation metrics. This ensures the ‘how’ behind the insight is as transparent as the ‘what’.
- Natural Language Explanation: Translating technical outputs into understandable business context is crucial for transparency. Every insight is paired with plain-language explanations describing the findings, their significance, and potentially their limitations, ensuring clarity for all stakeholders, including compliance officers and auditors.
Furthermore, we incorporate additional governance features for industries with specific compliance needs like role-based access controls, approval workflows for certain actions or reports, and comprehensive audit logs tracking user activity and system operations. This multi-layered approach ensures insights are accurate, fully transparent, explainable, and defensible.
How is App Orchid turning AI-generated insights into action with features like Generative Actions?
Generating insights is valuable, but the real goal is driving business outcomes. With the correct data and context, an agentic ecosystem can drive actions to bridge the critical gap between insight discovery and tangible action, moving analytics from a passive reporting function to an active driver of improvement.
Here’s how it works: When the Easy Answers platform identifies a significant pattern, trend, anomaly, or opportunity through its analysis, it leverages AI to propose specific, contextually relevant actions that could be taken in response.
These aren’t vague suggestions; they are concrete recommendations. For instance, instead of just flagging customers at high risk of churn, it might recommend specific retention offers tailored to different segments, potentially calculating the expected impact or ROI, and even drafting communication templates. When generating these recommendations, the system considers business rules, constraints, historical data, and objectives.
Crucially, this maintains human oversight. Recommended actions are presented to the appropriate users for review, modification, approval, or rejection. This ensures business judgment remains central to the decision-making process while AI handles the heavy lifting of identifying opportunities and formulating potential responses.
Once an action is approved, we can trigger an agentic flow for seamless execution through integrations with operational systems. This could mean triggering a workflow in a CRM, updating a forecast in an ERP system, launching a targeted marketing task, or initiating another relevant business process – thus closing the loop from insight directly to outcome.
How are knowledge graphs and semantic data models central to your platform’s success?
Knowledge graphs and semantic data models are the absolute core of the Easy Answers platform; they elevate it beyond traditional BI tools that often treat data as disconnected tables and columns devoid of real-world business context. Our platform uses them to build an intelligent semantic layer over enterprise data.
This semantic foundation is central to our success for several key reasons:
- Enables True Natural Language Interaction: The semantic model, structured as a knowledge graph with Managed Semantic Objects (MSOs), properties, and defined relationships, acts as a ‘Rosetta Stone’. It translates the nuances of human language and business terminology into the precise queries needed to retrieve data, allowing users to ask questions naturally without knowing underlying schemas. This is key to our high text-to-SQL accuracy.
- Preserves Critical Business Context: Unlike simple relational joins, our knowledge graph explicitly captures the rich, complex web of relationships between business entities (e.g., how customers interact with products through support tickets and purchase orders). This allows for deeper, more contextual analysis reflecting how the business operates.
- Provides Adaptability and Scalability: Semantic models are more flexible than rigid schemas. As business needs evolve or new data sources are added, the knowledge graph can be extended and modified incrementally without requiring a complete overhaul, maintaining consistency while adapting to change.
This deep understanding of data context provided by our semantic layer is fundamental to everything Easy Answers does, from basic Q&A to advanced pattern detection with Quick Insights, and it forms the essential foundation for our future agentic AI capabilities, ensuring agents can reason over data meaningfully.
What foundational models do you support, and how do you allow organizations to bring their own AI/ML models into the workflow?
We believe in an open and flexible approach, recognizing the rapid evolution of AI and respecting organizations’ existing investments.
For foundational models, we maintain integrations with leading options from multiple providers, including Google’s Gemini family, OpenAI’s GPT models, and prominent open-source alternatives like Llama. This allows organizations to choose models that best fit their performance, cost, governance, or specific capability needs. These models power various platform features, including natural language understanding for queries, SQL generation, insight summarization, and metadata generation.
Beyond these, we provide robust pathways for organizations to bring their own custom AI/ML models into the Easy Answers workflow:
- Models developed in Python can often be integrated directly via our AI Engine.
- We offer seamless integration capabilities with major cloud ML platforms such as Google Vertex AI and Amazon SageMaker, allowing models trained and hosted there to be invoked.
Critically, our semantic layer plays a key role in making these potentially complex custom models accessible. By linking model inputs and outputs to the business concepts defined in our knowledge graph (MSOs and properties), we allow non-technical business users to leverage advanced predictive, classification or causal models (e.g., through Quick Insights) without needing to understand the underlying data science – they interact with familiar business terms, and the platform handles the technical translation. This truly democratizes access to sophisticated AI/ML capabilities.
Looking ahead, what trends do you see shaping the next wave of enterprise AI—particularly in agent marketplaces and no-code agent design?
The next wave of enterprise AI is moving towards highly dynamic, composable, and collaborative ecosystems. Several converging trends are driving this:
- Agent Marketplaces and Registries: We’ll see a significant rise in agent marketplaces functioning alongside internal agent registries. This facilitates a shift from monolithic builds to a ‘rent and compose’ model, where organizations can dynamically discover and integrate specialized agents—internal or external—with specific capabilities as needed, dramatically accelerating solution deployment.
- Standardized Agent Communication: For these ecosystems to function, agents need common languages. Standardized agent-to-agent communication protocols, such as MCP (Model Context Protocol), which we leverage, and initiatives like Google’s Agent2Agent protocol, are becoming essential for enabling seamless collaboration, context sharing, and task delegation between agents, regardless of who built them or where they run.
- Dynamic Orchestration: Static, pre-defined workflows will give way to dynamic orchestration. Intelligent orchestration layers will select, configure, and coordinate agents at runtime based on the specific problem context, leading to far more adaptable and resilient systems.
- No-Code/Low-Code Agent Design: Democratization will extend to agent creation. No-code and low-code platforms will empower business experts, not just AI specialists, to design and build agents that encapsulate specific domain knowledge and business logic, further enriching the pool of available specialized capabilities.
App Orchid’s role is providing the critical semantic foundation for this future. For agents in these dynamic ecosystems to collaborate effectively and perform meaningful tasks, they need to understand the enterprise data. Our knowledge graph and semantic layer provide exactly that contextual understanding, enabling agents to reason and act upon data in relevant business terms.
How do you envision the role of the CTO evolving in a future where decision intelligence is democratized through agentic AI?
The democratization of decision intelligence via agentic AI fundamentally elevates the role of the CTO. It shifts from being primarily a steward of technology infrastructure to becoming a strategic orchestrator of organizational intelligence.
Key evolutions include:
- From Systems Manager to Ecosystem Architect: The focus moves beyond managing siloed applications to designing, curating, and governing dynamic ecosystems of interacting agents, data sources, and analytical capabilities. This involves leveraging agent marketplaces and registries effectively.
- Data Strategy as Core Business Strategy: Ensuring data is not just available but semantically rich, reliable, and accessible becomes paramount. The CTO will be central in building the knowledge graph foundation that powers intelligent systems across the enterprise.
- Evolving Governance Paradigms: New governance models will be needed for agentic AI – addressing agent trust, security, ethical AI use, auditability of automated decisions, and managing emergent behaviors within agent collaborations.
- Championing Adaptability: The CTO will be crucial in embedding adaptability into the organization’s technical and operational fabric, creating environments where AI-driven insights lead to rapid responses and continuous learning.
- Fostering Human-AI Collaboration: A key aspect will be cultivating a culture and designing systems where humans and AI agents work synergistically, augmenting each other’s strengths.
Ultimately, the CTO becomes less about managing IT costs and more about maximizing the organization’s ‘intelligence potential’. It’s a shift towards being a true strategic partner, enabling the entire business to operate more intelligently and adaptively in an increasingly complex world.
Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit App Orchid.
