Reliable, Smart Workflows for Finance, Wealth and Insurance — Karthic Rao, Perpetual

This talk introduces a system for building reliable, smart workflows in regulated industries like finance, wealth, and insurance. It addresses the limitations of fixed flowcharts for ambiguous tasks and the reliability issues of purely improvising agents. The proposed design places control flow, evidence, and external actions within a deterministic system, using models for interpretation and judgment at explicit, typed points. A planner translates requests into semantic graphs, and a compiler validates these against firm-defined action contracts, allowing for clarification requests or refusals. Approved plans are immutable, with external actions having separate gates. State machines handle waiting and follow-ups, and uncertain outcomes are routed to manual review. The design targets a ratio of smaller models for most decisions, with frontier models used sparingly, and outlines a roadmap for privately hosted inference and future training.