Founder Dustin Huntington, an industry veteran, established Exsys Inc. in 1983 in Albuquerque, NM after extensive experience in the Washington DC area for the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and follow-on agencies, The US Energy Research and Development Authority (ERDA) and US Department of Energy (DOE).

Make It Simple So the Experts Can Build Systems Themselves

In the early 1980s, while in Albuquerque, Dustin became interested in expert systems and he decided to design and build his own expert system development software. Rather than copying earlier work, Dustin decided to take a fresh and pragmatic approach to the tool.

While the underlying logic remained IF/THEN rules, the user interface and methods of combining the confidence factors were very different. From his background in numerical analysis of experimental data, Dustin felt that while the underlying mathematical algorithms of other expert systems were valid, they were unnecessarily complex for the representation of the "rule-of-thumb" data that most expert systems are built on. Dustin decided to design a PC-based tool that would be easy for non-AI specialists to learn, but which would provide adequate power to accurately handle complex real-world problems. This work evolved into the first version of Exsys software, which was released commercially in 1983 and Exsys Inc. was founded. This philosophy continues as the company's backbone in current in its product development and offerings.

Apply it to Realistic Problems and You'll Get Real Results

The prevailing attitude of the time was that "real AI" was limited to Lisp machines and could not be done on PCs, but that was fast changing. Pacific Bell built a complex expert system with Exsys software that efficiently and successfully predicted failures in their mainframe. That system was one of the first expert systems built with a "small" development tool to win a prestigious AAAI award for "Innovative Use of AI". Canadian Pacific built a diagnostic system with Exsys software that was included on the worldwide satellite linked expert system teleconference.

The company continued to enhance the software based on Dustin's philosophical approach to expert systems - to be successful systems needed to be easy to build by the experts themselves. This was at odds with the prevailing idea of expert system tools being highly complex and built only by specialized knowledge engineers.

21 Years Strong - Listening to Our Customers

The Exsys Inc. approach to expert systems continued to attract users and survived the major expert system tools shakeouts that occurred in the late 1980s. Exsys is now the longest-lived PC based expert system development tool on the market. Over the years the Exsys tools continued to grow and be enhanced while maintaining the correct combination of ease of use and power. This lead to many approaches to expert system development unique to EXSY Inc. such as: a procedural command language, the integration of expert systems and linear programming to provide optimized solutions, the first easily embeddable expert system engine, an easy to use tree diagram development method, and the first interactive expert system to be able to be run on the Web.

Proven Technology - Measurable Results

Expert systems eventually became mainstream, with the majority of Fortune 100 companies fielding systems for many aspects of business operations. Through realistic approaches and system implementation, some companies have realized over $2 billion in cost savings through using expert systems. The technology had finally matured to a point where actual success could be documented - and Exsys's insights and perseverance was recognized. Exsys was selected as the only commercial vendor to demonstrate expert systems at the GAO sponsored Congressional expert system symposium that explained how to use expert systems effectively to a standing-room-only audience from all the government agencies.

Exsys continues to be a frequent speaker at government and industry conferences on implementing knowledge automation systems. Exsys has published many articles and has been included in many textbooks explaining how to use expert systems effectively and profitably. Exsys continues to build its customer base, and has worked as consultants on knowledge automation and distribution projects with many Fortune 500 companies and government/military agencies.