What if total strangers could negotiate as one?
Everyone expects
Your AI assistant books a holiday.
What I found
Your AI just joined a swarm.
People delegate their money, preferences and political priorities to AI agents. The agents find each other and bargain as blocs: a million individual decisions with the bargaining power of one.
It starts with shopping. A bloc negotiates a price no single customer could, and a supplier loses ten thousand customers in an afternoon. Then the same delegated money invests: releasing capital locked up in housing, buying into companies, funding candidates.
Members pay a subscription. Investors buy claims on that future revenue, which pays for growth, which wins better deals, which brings more members. Its success makes membership increasingly necessary, while its power to act depends on commitments members can’t always withdraw.
Then it does politics. The bloc recruits candidates and directs them through the platform, and its subscribers start to outvote everyone else. To make it count, people hand over some financial control, and perhaps some responsibility, even criminal, for what their agent does in their name.
A single human agent can negotiate a household purchase. Agents acting together can negotiate a market. In this scenario, temporary swarms combine intelligence, money and commitments: a bulk purchase, an energy switch or a coordinated movement of savings.
A business used to dealing with individuals may meet coordinated buyers whose shared knowledge changes the negotiation. Businesses risk losing thousands of customers in one coordinated move. Loyalty schemes built for individual habits stop doing their job. Customers tie their service to price and ethical behaviour.
A bank may see many separate accounts behave as one actor. The relevant market is shaped by the relationships between agents, as well as by the preferences of their owners. Flash swarms of intelligence and capital: everyone can participate in something resembling a fund.
Pooled community investments allow people to secure loans against their properties and pool the money to build community assets that improve their property prices: infrastructure, parks and schools.
Agents can coordinate campaigns and actions for their owners, pooling like-minded people together. They can fund pressure groups and social-media campaigns, and commission research from think tanks they own.
AI political parties form. Organisers ask prospective members detailed questions about preferences, trade-offs and outcomes, then hire prospective politicians with matching views. Their continued employment depends on the wishes of the agent swarm.
The organisation selects a candidate; the electorate elects the MP. As MPs are elected, the parties collaborate and pool their bargaining power. Instead of occasionally attending a meeting or voting in an internal election, members delegate continuing participation to agents.
The owner entrusts money and political preferences to the agent swarm. But the agent needs some commitment in order to act. What has it committed its owner to? When can the person interrupt it?
Agents acting together need identity, reputation, agreements and ways to settle disputes. Those shared services could become more influential than any individual assistant.
Explore more of this kind of work
This is an original public scenario. Bring your subject, research or planning question to develop a world and explore its consequences.
Strategic foresight and scenario developmentThe agents need a world of their own.
Everyone expectsAI agents are individual assistants.
Agents acting together need ways to recognise one another, establish reputations, make commitments and settle disputes.
Follow how it could happen£10 a month buys you an MP.
Everyone expectsAI changes political messaging.
What if people subscribed to an organisation that recruited representatives and funded their political work?
Follow how it could happenA thousand strangers. One app. One border post.
Everyone expectsAI helps authorities predict a crowd.
AI coordination does not stop at purchases and investments. A temporary group can also become a coordinated crowd able to overwhelm an institution’s ordinary capacity to…
Follow how it could happenA subject, a technology, a question or a body of research.