AppliedAI, a company based in Abu Dhabi that jokingly refers to itself as "the world's most boring AI firm," today announced the global availability of Opus, a compliant agent business process management tool designed to help companies in the most heavily regulated industries adopt AI automation.
Established in 2021, AppliedAI focuses on automating critical business workloads for enterprises in highly regulated sectors such as healthcare, financial services, and government. This is made possible by the Opus platform, which leverages a specialized "large work model" and a proprietary work knowledge graph to deliver transparent and fully auditable automated outcomes with oversight.
Opus transforms business workflows generated by large work models into structured task sequences that allow for human review and supervision. Meanwhile, the work knowledge graph addresses the complexity and precision required to generate clear workflows. It encodes industry-specific procedures and operational knowledge into graph-based representations, ensuring that workflows are highly accurate and compliant with domain-specific regulations.
In simpler terms, Opus is built to handle the massive volume of manual paperwork typically processed by companies in industries like financial services, insurance, and healthcare—such as verifying complex medical billing records or insurance claims. Enterprises often hire teams of people to perform these tasks or outsource them to firms like Cognizant Inc. or Wipro Inc.—regardless of the method, the work consumes hundreds of hours and costs millions in employee wages.
Arya Bolurfrushan, founder and CEO of AppliedAI, stated that Opus can perform these tasks faster and more cost-effectively, automating the majority of the process while incorporating human reviewers to ensure accuracy. “All of our work involves what we call high-error-cost workflows—often life-critical,” Bolurfrushan told Forbes in February. “You can't afford hallucinations, which is why there's a fundamental harmony between our AI and human agents.”
Self-Service AI Automation
Until now, AppliedAI has functioned more like an AI consulting firm, with Opus only available to select clients and deeply integrated into their systems to ensure deployments achieve their intended outcomes. However, the company now believes Opus is ready for the mainstream and is offering it as a self-service platform for the first time, expanding its reach to any business looking to implement AI automation.
AppliedAI anticipates strong demand for platforms like Opus. It cites the MIT Sloan 2025 State of Business AI Report, which found that even today, 95% of generative AI pilot projects ultimately fail, leading to millions in wasted research costs. According to Bolurfrushan, the 5% of AI pilots that succeed do so because they are built on systems that can learn and adapt, seamlessly integrate into business workflows, and are held accountable.
This is precisely what Opus was designed to achieve. It identifies, evaluates, and prioritizes opportunities for AI automation, then generates workflows that are fully compliant from the outset, capable of integrating with any platform and learning as processes evolve. Opus also has notable credentials. AppliedAI developed the tool in collaboration with Palantir Technologies Inc., McKinsey & Company, Metalab, and G42 Holding Ltd. (better known as G42), specifically to help businesses transition from AI experimentation to production.
“The world doesn’t need more pilots. It needs production,” Bolurfrushan said. “Pilots fail because they are static—non-learning, non-integrating, ROI-negative. Opus is the antidote: self-evolving workflows that empower process owners, shorten design and iteration cycles, embed compliance and human oversight, and compound durable value with every use.”
Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. believes AppliedAI could be a disruptive force in enterprise AI—not only because of Opus’s technology, but also due to its Middle Eastern location.
“AI promises not only to transform software automation but also to recalibrate where innovation happens,” said the analyst. “The Middle East has become a significant hub for AI funding, and now it has its own startup, AppliedAI, emerging from Abu Dhabi. This could be a factor in sovereign automation, where all intellectual property originates from the Middle East, potentially making the company a more suitable AI partner for local firms.”
Opus is delivered via the Opus Cloud platform, which combines enterprise-grade compliance and reliability with consumer-level usability, enabling companies of all sizes to launch and run agent-based business process automation quickly. For large enterprises, Opus Enterprise offers dedicated support and extended governance capabilities.
Bolurfrushan says Opus has already delivered substantial benefits for clients across multiple industries. For example, he claims it reduced the average energy procurement cycle time from four hours to just ten minutes, and in manufacturing vendor onboarding, it cut vendor processing time from two weeks to only five minutes—just two examples among many he provided.
“We’re not in the hype business,” Bolurfrushan added. “We’re in the results business. Opus is built to empower process owners, reinvent their operations, and deliver measurable ROI through discipline and oversight.”
It’s not just Bolurfrushan praising Opus. McKinsey analyst Tamim Saleh highlights its unique combination of trust, compliance, and operational discipline. “It compresses months of process reengineering into minutes, blends agent AI with human judgment, and enables responsible scale in industries where failure is not an option,” Saleh said. “This is a solid path to operational reinvention.”
