72. Symbolic AI: The next AI architecture, inspired by our brains with Nikolay Gurianov - Braintree

AI may be scaling fast, but we hear from Nikolay that the current wave has already hit a ceiling. Pattern recognition alone is not enough to deliver the next leap in business value. Nikolay's company Braintree believes that the future lies in symbolic AI: systems that do more than predict likely outputs and instead work with abstractions, concepts and meaning. That matters commercially because it points to AI that can operate more like a true interface between people and data, with stronger reasoning, faster real-time performance and far lower infrastructure demands.The bigger business claim is efficiency. Nikolay argues that by mimicking how human memory rewrites, compresses and reorganises information, Braintree can dramatically cut data size, compute requirements and energy use. That has implications far beyond model design: lower operating costs, more practical deployment, and a credible path to sovereign AI stacks that keep data local and controllable. As a founder building outside the mainstream LLM playbook, Nikolay positions Braintree not as a rejection of today’s AI boom, but as building the next generation of AI.AI is our Business.UKAI is the Trade Association for AI businesses across the UK. Join us, ukai.co