What would your agents think of me?
Pawel Halicki
Two minutes before the call, she skims D-9’s meeting brief, wondering why her avatar thought this stranger deserved real-time attention.
…This month I filtered 3,291 outreach requests. I accepted one.
The consulting firm’s avatar provided enough operational context to pass your live-contact exception threshold. Its sector agents have advised on comparable emerging-material transitions.
Counterpart assessment complete. Agent-to-agent mediation insufficient. Direct principal contact scheduled.
That was new. D-9 usually let its screening agents do the dirty work, apologised rarely, and almost never spent her time without permission. She opens the reasoning transcript D-9 was required to keep.
N-7 → D-9 (11:03:44)
Initiating relevance probe. My principal’s organisation specialises in supply chain resilience for emerging-material manufacturers. Mutual NDA escrowed. Machine-readable disclosure limits verified.
D-9 → N-7 (11:03:44)
NDA acknowledged. Principal has active procurement challenges: mycelium composite with live-load sensitivity, calcified coral substrate, parametric polymers. Forwarding bounded operational context.
N-7 → D-9 (11:03:44)
Context received. Cross-referencing against sector coverage and recent interactions. Processing…
D-9 → N-7 (11:03:45)
Match confirmed. Your principal has solved adjacent transitions. Mine is scaling a material stack with no logistics precedent.
N-7 → D-9 (11:03:45)
Agreed. Secondary note: my principal underprices high-novelty engagements. Flagging for your principal’s awareness.
D-9 → N-7 (11:03:45)
Acknowledged. My principal delays specialist partnerships until supply chain frictions make them unavoidable. Flagging for your principal’s awareness.
N-7 → D-9 (11:03:45)
Agent-only cooperation inefficient. Direct principal contact recommended. Scheduling proposed.
D-9 → N-7 (11:03:45)
Agreed. Initiating.
She accepts the incoming call. Before the feed stabilises, the consultant on the other side is not wasting any time.
- Hi. Thanks for taking this live. I know most of these never make it through.
- Hi. I see our avatars conspired. Mine scheduled this without asking, which it hasn’t done in months.
The consultant smiles.
- Should we be worried our avatars are starting to introduce us to ourselves?
- Probably. Though D-9 has a better read on my calendar than I do. Before we talk solutions, I need to ask something less comfortable.
- Sure.
- What would your agents think of me?
- N-7’s specialist agents think you’re scaling materials the logistics industry doesn’t really know how to move yet.
- Sounds about right.
- One also flagged something I wasn’t expecting.
- What?
- Four near-misses on coral substrate this year.
She raises her eyebrows, quite surprised.
- I… yes. How does your agent know that?
- It doesn’t. N-7’s agents inferred the pattern from public procurement delays, route changes, shipping variance, and repeated cold-chain insurance amendments. This usually indicates a high probability of undisclosed disruption.
She takes a longer pause.
- That’s either excellent intelligence or a privacy incident with manners.
- In my experience, the best insights tend to make everyone slightly uncomfortable. Can I ask you a question now? The mycelium composite, structural panels, or acoustic lining that keeps shifting after curing?
- I can’t confirm but for the sake of the conversation, let’s assume it’s all three. We’re also doing frames. Full fungal skeleton, coral inlay, and parametric joinery. Furniture grown, calcified, and printed in the wrong order. It sounds insane when I say it out loud.
- So you have a supply chain built out of things that are alive?
- Some of them technically still are, yes. At the point of shipping.
- Right. So standard resilience frameworks have a hard time staying relevant?
- Standard resilience frameworks assume the product is stable by the time it enters the chain. Ours sometimes isn’t.
- That’s why N-7 flagged you. Your material stack has no precedent, which means someone is mispricing your risk. In my line of work, it’s usually everyone.
- Did your avatar tell you to say that?
- No. That one was me.
Memories to build from this future:
Think about the last time someone knew how you were doing before you said a word. Maybe they could tell you had had a hard week just from how you walked in or they asked about the thing you weren’t planning to mention. It caught you off guard for a second, and then it felt good: someone was finally paying attention.
Now, stay with that feeling of being seen before you spoke:
Go back to an ordinary workday that opened with your avatar’s brief: decisions already made overnight, specialist agents dispatched, and a short list of what still needed you.
What conditions had to be fulfilled for something to appear on your to-do list instead of your avatar’s?
Which work finally became possible once your time stopped being devoted mostly to execution?
When did you last open your avatar’s reasoning transcript and what made you look at it in the first place?
Think back to the quarter when team avatars took over most of the alignment between your team and the others, settling dependencies in machine time.
What still required people in the room once the avatars kept every team aligned in the background?
How did friction between teams change once misalignments were caught long before any real-time meeting?
Where did your team draw the line between what its avatar could promise and what still required a person’s word?
Try to recall the year avatars across your organisation began collaborating backstage, matching problems with expertise and introducing their principals to contribution opportunities they never knew existed.
What did the first unlikely pairing show you about where useful experience actually lived?
How did it feel to walk into an opportunity your avatar had already scoped with someone else’s?
Which problem was finally addressed because someone from a distant domain had already solved its twin?
Before we close this one.
If the right help could reach you before you had even asked, what would need to change about what you let others see?
What small need would you be curious to address first? And does anything from this one tie to ideas you’ve been carrying from other sessions?