G arry Tiscovschi, BA (2021) studied Management Science and Information Systems at Trinity, which he says was ‘one of the first undergraduate courses in Europe to include AI training’. He liked to attend evening classes on entrepreneurship in Tangent and his friend Fareed Idris would come along, despite being in UCD. The pair were ‘obsessive coders’ since school – Tangent helped ‘open our eyes’ to the business side. In April 2023 they founded Kreoh, together with another Trinity graduate, David McSharry. Garry explains that they were motivated by ‘three passions’: ‘first, Gen AI; second, we love automating paperwork, which may sound crazy but as a student I worked in Germany managing summer schools, which involved a ton of paperwork and I knew AI could be a gamechanger. Our third passion is research and development (R&D): getting more companies to do R&D is vital for developing the Irish ecosystem.’ Governments incentivise R&D by offering impressive tax breaks – worth $24 billion in the US, £7.6 billion in the UK, and €1.5 billion in Ireland. But companies have to prove their eligibility through a rigorous process which involves preparing reports of up to 100 pages. Often, it’s only the multinationals that have the resources for this. Garry, Fareed and David developed a product to help write these reports and set up Kreoh to license it. Kreoh’s ‘R&D Claim Engine’ is AI-augmented but human- led. Garry explains that it works through multiple AI assistants: ‘the company provides structured and unstructured data about their research projects, which is then organised by the ‘admin assistant’ and the ‘library assistant’ who cross-pollinate information. The ‘drafting assistant’ then gets to work on the first draft while, at the same time, the ‘validation assistant’ is verifying that similar research hasn’t already been carried out by competitors within the timeframe – that would be disqualifying for the tax credit. Unlike humans, AI can conduct hundreds of simultaneous online searches on multiple databases – I call it ‘the eye of Sauron’ because it doesn't miss a thing! Human experts then start perfecting the AI-produced draft and their work is looked over by the ‘reviewing assistant’ before the report is submitted to the government.’ All these assistants make it sound like a beehive – each bee working separately and together towards the greater mission – but the metaphor Garry favours is ‘the human brain’: ‘Gen AI is the prefrontal cortex, the reasoning part, and through a process called grounding, we’ve added working memory, which is the specialist training around how to write these reports, and long-term memory which is knowledge of the R&D field and tax regulations. We have the ‘librarian assistant’ chewing on information in the background to ensure that it is ready when needed – we modelled this on human sleep. We know that sleep is when the information you received during the day is processed.’ He points out that other AI engines don’t have this processing ‘downtime’: ‘Basically ChatGPT is like a party animal that doesn’t sleep – maybe that’s why it hallucinates!’ Obviously Kreoh can’t have their Claim Engine hallucinating – any false data and the report would be rejected instantly. To prevent this, they coded that all information has to be sourced and referenced – basically they have a ‘footnoting assistant’. Garry thinks that it’s because they are recent graduates, not long out of college, that they are ‘hyper-aware of the importance of sourcing’. When Kreoh launched in April 2023, they licensed the first month for free to a large company that had 20 technical writers dedicated to producing R&D reports. That was a success and their customer base has now expanded to include both large companies and SME’s who wouldn’t otherwise have the capability to write these reports. Clients typically sign into a three-year contract. Kreoh has measured the KPIs: ‘our claim engine helps our clients produce five times as many reports as previously, and they spend half as much time dealing with paperwork and reviewals, which means more time to spend on R&D. And governments obviously like our AI + Human model because our reports are getting a favourable response.’ Kreoh is now actively hiring software engineers, technical leaders and marketing people. For the moment, they will stay within their USP, which is automating paperwork and writing applications: ‘We don’t do the kind of persuasive writing that’s involved in applying for grants where you’re competing with others. I’m sure AI could help there but our USP is regulated reporting for R&D tax credits, patent applications, VAT and the like. By deploying AI assistants to help with these, we’re freeing people up to do their core work.’ He is adamant that AI won’t lead to large-scale unemployment but will change how we work. ‘AI + Human is the future, with humans providing instructions or programming to technology. At Kreoh, our team does the problem-solving and 'world-modelling' that GenAI doesn't have the architecture for, and the repetitive and standard code snippets are suggested by our AI co-pilots.’ He believes ‘Ireland has more talent in AI than people realise’. Kreoh has hired significantly from Trinity, and Dublin has a ‘great tech social scene’: ‘We all meet up frequently to demo and help each other out. At Dogpatch, where we’re based, you’re always bumping into interesting people in the corridor who offer to introduce you to someone useful for your business. It’s a really supportive culture which benefits everyone.’
Download PDF file