I’ve been thinking about a concept like a “coordination overhang.” It is the gap between what any group of people could achieve in collaboration, vs what they actually achieve. I think the agents used as coordination technology could help meaningfully decrease the gap. Any group of people (e.g. teams, labs, communities), has latent potential for what they could do together. There is some much better version of the collaboration where the right questions come up, relevant knowledge gets surfaced, hidden complementarities are discovered, and everyone leaves knowing what to do next. Reality usually lands somewhere below that. Each person enters with only a partial view of what everyone else knows, has tried, is curious about, and can contribute. A group can have an excellent conversation and still miss the most valuable thing it could have done together. Simple example: two individuals meet at a conference. One has been stuck on a problem for months, while the other has already developed a method that could help solve it. Neither side realizes the connection, so they have a perfectly good conversation about their work and move on. Sometimes those things are naturally uncovered and it feels serendipitous. But intuitively it's likely that is a lot more that goes unsaid. AI agents could become a new coordination technology for closing this gap. They could analyze everything people have been working on, identify relevant overlaps before they meet, bring the right context into the conversation, run analysis across the group’s combined knowledge, and then provide the tools to turn a promising connection into actual work. They would essentially be cranking the dial on serendipity. The people still decide what matters and whether to act. The agents make more of the group’s latent potential visible and actionable. This is a high-level thought rn, but we at @JoinEdgeCity are working on improving these kinds of collective intelligence processes by running experiments using multi-agent systems. h/t to the folks at @RenPhilanthropy and @indexnetwork_ for the work they're doing in developing these ideas with us.