2 min read

How Orca Helps Your AI Adapt to Changing Business Objectives

Written by
Rob McKeon
Published on
October 11, 2024

The Problem

In real-world applications, AI/ML models must evolve with changing business objectives, which often means recalibrating performance metrics and altering expected outcomes. As both internal and customers’ business priorities shift, previously highly accurate models can lose functionality without the flexibility to adapt dynamically to these new demands. Common scenarios include:

  • Promoting New Products in Retail: A retail company might shift focus from one product category to another each season, requiring its recommendation model to emphasize different items.
  • Removing Sensitivity to Outdated Data: If a company sells off a division, its sentiment analysis models need to ignore reviews related to that business unit, sparing resources and preventing confusion during future analysis.
  • Increasing Sensitivity to Product Handling in Warehouses: After a series of warehouse accidents, a logistics company may wish to optimize for minimizing product damage, even if that adjustment might slow down processing times. 
  • Competing Leadership Priorities: If you’re building internal models, you’ll probably find that different departments may score negative reviews differently. An account management team may look at weighting feedback on services higher than a product or engineering team that wants to index higher when reviews talk about product features or bugs. 

Without adaptability, even high-performing models become obsolete, causing them to misalign with shifting operational and business goals. 

The Status Quo

The inflexibility of static models limits responsiveness to new business needs. Traditional methods for addressing changing priorities include:

  1. Training or Fine Tuning New Models: Retraining reweights the model, but it requires fresh datasets, significant time and enough resources. Having to create multiple models for different stakeholders or customers can also create technical debt as more models must be managed, maintained and updated.
  2. Transfer Learning: For highly adjacent projects and data, transfer learning can quickly adapt models. However, fine tuning a new model off these steps assumes that you’re still able to use the same input data. There’s also risks of overfitting and general performance degradation.
  3. Human-in-the-Loop Processes: As an interim step, humans can clean up the newly created errors in the model. However, this will confront scalability issues and requires an ongoing cost that you previously avoided with your existing model.

All three approaches can mitigate immediate inaccuracies but often lack the efficiency needed to quickly and sustainably respond to evolving priorities. This lag can lead to missed revenue opportunities, reduced profitability, dissatisfied stakeholders and delayed project timelines.

How Orca Helps You Respond Faster

Orca’s innovative memory-augmented architecture empowers models to adapt almost instantly by integrating external, updateable information directly into inference processes. With Orca, adapting models to new business objectives becomes straightforward and cost-effective. Here’s how Orca achieves this:

  • Real-Time Adaptation: Introducing new external data into Orca’s memory store allows models to respond immediately to updated criteria. This agility is invaluable for dynamic business environments where speed is critical.
  • Built-In Flexibility: Orca models leverage reasoning abilities created during initial training and selectively reference external data as needed. This modularity reduces a model’s dependency on frequent retraining to adjust to new (or temporary) goals, minimizing both cost and time.
  • Simplified Model Management: Instead of managing multiple dedicated models for each change in business goals, a single Orca model can serve diverse needs by switching memory configurations, significantly reducing the complexity of managing many similar models in production.

Orca’s architecture ensures businesses can adjust models seamlessly to reflect their current strategic objectives, whether it’s pivoting to new products, refining models to ignore outdated data, or adjusting for different operational priorities, all without sacrificing efficiency or incurring high costs.

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