Most companies discovered AI last year. Our co-founder has been building agent systems since the 1990s. Here's how that changes what we think — and what we build.
By Paul Groom, Co-Founder, Nearfield.ai
The conversation around AI has become almost impossible to follow. LLMs, Agents, Automation, GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, a new term every week, each one presented as if it changes everything, and very little of it explained in a way that helps a business owner make a single practical decision.
I want to offer a different angle. Not another explainer. A perspective.
My co-founder and CEO is Dr Raj Curwen, a computer scientist who has been building intelligent agent systems since the early 1990s. While most of the business world is discovering AI for the first time, Raj built his first agent compiler thirty years ago, working on a multi-agent system for managing industrial business processes at ICI. His PhD, completed at Loughborough University, explored machine memory and context, ideas that now sit at the heart of what Nearfield builds.
When Raj talks about AI, he isn't reacting to a trend. He's been waiting for the world to catch up.
The thing most people get wrong
The mistake most organisations make with AI is treating it as a better version of the tools they already have. A faster search. A smarter assistant. A way to do the same things slightly more efficiently.
Raj's view, and I'd encourage you to read it in his own words here: The Agent State of Mind
The shift AI creates isn't about speed. It's about where human judgement is applied.
For thirty years, skilled people have spent the majority of their time on implementation, the manual execution of processes that follow consistent rules and produce predictable outputs. AI removes that bottleneck. It handles the implementation. It frees people to do what only people can do: apply experience, make judgements, set direction, and take responsibility for outcomes.
That's not a productivity improvement. That's a structural change in how work gets done.
Why we build Agents - not generic AI
This is why Nearfield doesn't build general AI tools. We build Agents, purpose-built systems designed to execute a specific, high-stakes workflow end to end, with the accuracy and auditability that real-world operations demand.
The distinction matters. A general AI tool is optimised for breadth, it can do many things reasonably well. An Agent is optimised for depth, it does one thing with a level of reliability that a general tool cannot match.
For PIIQ, that one thing is Subject Access Request and FOIA processing.
Discovery, contextual analysis, AI redaction, Proof of Redaction, audit-ready output.
Not approximately. Not most of the time. Every document, every request, every time, with a full audit trail your DPO can stand behind.
Raj's background in compiler design, declarative languages and machine memory sits underneath all of it. This isn't an AI product built by a team that discovered agents last year. It's the work of someone who has been thinking about autonomous systems, machine context and intelligent orchestration for three decades.
That's a different foundation. And it produces a different result.
What this means for you
You don't need to understand the technology. You need to understand one question:
Which process in your organisation follows consistent rules, demands high accuracy, carries real compliance risk, and is currently consuming your best people's time?
That's where an Agent belongs. That's where the structural change happens. And that's the conversation I'd like to have with you.
If you'd like to understand more about how Raj thinks about AI and agent systems, it's worth ten minutes of your time: rajcurwen.com
If you'd like to see what it looks like in practice then I'd welcome 15 minutes to show you PIIQ on real data.
This month we're also offering a 2-day free trial with £1,000 of processing credits, so you can test it on your own DSARs before committing to anything.
Talk to Paul — reply to this article or email directly.
· 🌐 piiq.nearfield.ai · nearfield.ai
My business partner Dr Raj Curwen and I founded Nearfield.ai in 2023.
Raj is a genious Computer Scientist, and is one of the most gifted and visionary people that I have…
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