After listening to the latest talk of Prof. Bob Kowalski on What is AI?, I remembered his talk about logical AI at the joint session of DecisionCAMP and RuleML+RR in 2017 in London. It also reminded my own prediction about “What is the next “killer” application for Decision Management?” at that time. Here is what I wrote about a Decision Reasoner in 2017:

“I don’t remember hearing any specific answer at DecisionCAMP. I just noticed that we probably should look for an answer at our co-located conference “RuleML+RR” where semantic web people already have created good reasoning tools. If we consider our decision models as “decision ontologies” and apply similar reasoning tools to them, we would not need to force our customers to write specific rules that lead to the calculation of insurance premiums or acceptance/rejection of loan applications. Having rules to define all relationships inside our interrelated decision models (ontologies), they (users) would only need to specify the goal (e.g. insurance premium), and then a Decision Reasoner will automatically calculate it for a particular insurance policy.“

The latest GenAI tools make the creation and maintenance of “Decision Ontologies” much more practical. With these tools, we will not need symbolic rules to define ALL relationships inside our interrelated decision models (ontologies). So, the question today becomes more specific: “Will modern Decision Intelligence platforms integrated with large language models (LLMs) bring us closer to this goal?” Time will tell, but it appears we are moving in that direction.