Reasoning Technology was founded in Austin, Texas in 2009 by Thomas Walker Lynch. Our namesake Reasoning Technology® approach to AI places people at the center of the process. In this manner people may reach conclusions while understanding how they got there. Our approach has turned out to have important advantages.

With conventional AI tools the goal has been to reach conclusions while leaving people out of the process as much as possible. It is unavoidable that such AI will be positioned to replace people, but this is an unstable situation given the current state of the art. A symptom of this instability is the explainability problem.

As an example of the explainability problem, consider what happens when a person, versus what happens when an AI, scores a bank loan application, or makes a hiring decision. A person will take into account laws and conventions that are designed to safeguard against certain types of prejudicial or otherwise known to be flawed thinking. In contrast, such flawed thinking might be exactly what a conventional AI program did before reaching an unexplained decision. We just can not know, because the conventional AI can not explain to us what it did.