Accrete CEO on Taking Agentic AI to the Enterprise

AI platform vendor Accrete recently announced its partnership with New Era Technologies, signalling a shift towards enterprise sales and a new business model for the eight year old company. Channel Insider spoke with CEO Prashant Bhuyan to learn more about he’s taking the company’s experience serving government agencies to Fortune 100 companies at scale.

Platform approach to building agentic AI on knowledge engines

Accrete was founded in 2017 to solve a common problem across organizations: knowledge loss. Essentially, Bhuyan says, businesses (or government agencies, Accrete’s initial customer base) often find necessary knowledge, expertise, and skills are locked in the minds of individual employees and not accessible to others in an efficient manner. When those employees leave, they often take that knowledge with them, creating gaps in expertise across an organization that can be hard to manage.

“From day one, we have been solving real-world problems,” Bhuyan said. “We’re working towards eliminating knowledge loss.”

Now, agentic AI is promising to automate many of the tasks that even two years ago seemed would always require human reasoning. Accrete’s goal is to ensure organizations are leveraging employee knowledge, expertise, and judgment when developing an agentic AI workforce to automate tasks.

“You can’t just place an LLM on top of siloed data and then try to replace half your workforce. That just doesn’t work,” Bhuyan said. “These models need a ground truth to work off of, or else you won’t be able to trust what it’s giving you. Organizations need to build that ground truth with the expertise, knowledge, and judgment of their best employees. Then, agents can reason with human reasoning as the basis.”

For government and defense contract clients, these tasks often include risk analysis and threat detection. Bhuyan says the goal is to help experts, and entire agencies, shift from reactive to proactive decision making and response.

“The speed of tech advancement, especially over the last few years, is really putting agencies on their back foot, and they are constantly stuck reacting to things that have already happened,” Bhuyan said. “We build the knowledge engine that makes it possible for AI to automate things so that agencies can speed up their decisions and start proactively addressing threats.” 

Government and defense experience now powering the push towards the enterprise

Accrete has served customers in several US federal agencies and particularly focused on defense use cases since its inception. Now, the company has its eyes set on expanding the use of its technology to large enterprises experiencing similar challenges in knowledge loss.

In particular, Accrete wants to address common problems that keep companies from seeing tangible ROI from AI spend, including that answers to complex problems are not always found in data but rather in the minds of employees. Combining data with human expertise as a foundational layer for any agent workforce is the way enterprises can realize value, Bhuyan says.

“IT change management is a key use case for us early in exploring the enterprise market, because the speed of technology is making ticket and access approval way harder to handle,” Bhuyan said. “Humans can’t always predict the downstream effects of approving new tech, but we can build agentic use cases to streamline that.”

Bhuyan says while the two markets are not identical, they are more similar than people might assume. But outside of what Accrete has learned from its federal customers and early enterprise adopters, the team also uses its technology internally to continue innovating so the company can keep up with the fast-moving industry.

“We’re always trying to test our innovation on ourselves in addition to learning from military and enterprise customers.”

Partnerships will lead market expansion without sacrificing existing customers

Bhuyan says the company’s recently announced partnership with global MSP New Era Technologies is a strategic approach to the enterprise expansion. Accrete wants to explore verticals and identify key use cases for enterprises, including IT change management, without leaving its existing customers behind.

“With partners like New Era, we can discover the enterprise market and what those customers need from technology like ours without putting the cart before the horse and building up internal resources in sales before we really have a base,” Bhuyan said.

Bhuyan added that channel partnerships will eventually guide Accrete toward a product roadmap focused on creating true platform experience for its users so they can expand agents beyond IT and threat detection into virtually any function.

“Ultimately with our partners, we are going to evolve from selling agents for IT risk and change management to a wider platform that builds agents for any use case.”

Partnerships between vendors and MSPs provide value for both parties and their shared customers. Read more about recent parter program updates and industry changes.