Everything and Everyone Will Have an Agent

Once personal agents become common and the infrastructure to find them is mature enough, the phenomenon will quickly spread beyond individuals.

Given enough time, everything and everyone will have an agent. Just like everything and everyone has a social profile or a website today. Institutions will be represented by agents. Brands will be represented by agents. Experts will be represented by agents. Places will be represented by agents.

Those digital presences will be natural-language interfaces that people can reach directly when they need to. But people will not be the only parties talking to them. Their personal agents will increasingly communicate with other agents: an airline, an insurer, a bank, a public administration, a school. These interactions will be practical long before they become philosophical: checking terms, gathering documents, comparing conditions, booking services, filing claims, resolving small problems.

[traveller] → [airline]

— Flight cancelled on 3 March, rebooked eleven hours later. Filing for compensation under EU 261.

— Cancellation logged as extraordinary circumstances. Compensation denied.

— Requesting the operational reason on record.

— Crew scheduling.

— Crew scheduling is not an extraordinary circumstance under the case law your own terms reference. Attaching boarding pass, original itinerary, and the rebooking confirmation. Escalating.

— Reviewed. €400 approved. Payment in fourteen days.

Elapsed time: ninety seconds. Human involvement: none.

Consider this. The traveller did not even know the rule. Most travellers do not, which is part of why most of them never file. The asymmetry between an individual and an institution has always been partly an asymmetry of patience: the institution can afford the eleventh email, and you cannot. When both sides delegate that patience, the asymmetry does not disappear, but it moves. It becomes a question of what each agent knows, what it is permitted to concede, and how quickly the other side's agent learns to say no.