Networks of collaborative AI agents will transform how we work, says this expert

It's commonplace for artificial intelligence (AI) experts in research and industry to talk about AI agents and agentic AI as the focus of innovation. OpenAI's Sam Altman said as much almost a year ago at the company's unveiling of an online store for custom GPTs and has elaborated at length about how agents will take on much more complex tasks than today's copilots.

The next step beyond today's agentic AI may be networks of agents that collaborate to achieve more complex tasks, mostly without human supervision, according to Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and chief technology officer of software maker Hubspot. 

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"I think over the fullness of time, we're gonna see these agents collaborate with each other, right?" said Shah in an interview with ZDNET via Zoom this week. 

"Agents are effectively a progression up from copilots," said Shah. "And I think both will have their place in the business landscape. What makes agents interesting is that they can take on, kind-of, higher-order goals that usually involve multiple steps."

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Hubspot is competing with firms, such as Salesforce, to roll out various agents to assist with customer relationship management (CRM) tasks, including sales, marketing, customer relationship management, and more.

To connect those agents, Hubspot is promoting the idea of a network that acts as a marketplace for agents. At its annual user conference a week ago, Inbound, alongside a suite of AI offerings call Breeze, Hubspot unveiled a network for agents called agent.ai. 

The offering has over 47,000 users, Hubspot announced, and more than 1,700 builders signed up to create agents of their own.

"This is a professional network for agents, which I am personally involved in," Shah told ZDNET. "Think of it as the number one professional network for agents, unlike LinkedIn, which is for humans."

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Through the network, you can imagine teams of agents, consisting of "mini agents", and a supervising agent, explained Shah. 

"Over time, as these agents develop, they're going to be able to, kind-of, use each other. So, one agent says, 'I'm an agent that helps you do research on a company,' right?" 

That agent would look through public company transcripts, such as earnings calls. "Then, there's an agent that will go look at the [corporate] website, and see how web traffic and all those kinds of things are doing, it'll pull all that data together," said Shah. 

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"So, these global kinds of mini agents are used by a kind of higher-level agent, so, you're sort-of composing these agents like Legos, then building higher-order structures."

The agents become "digital teammates", according to Shah. The agents.ai network is a marketplace to find which agents can do which tasks, "see what their experience is, whether they'd be a good fit or not" based on the feedback of users of agents.

Past efforts to build collaborating "objects", such as the CORBA standard in the 1990s, were stymied by interoperability, noted Shah. This time around, the natural language ability of generative AI becomes the connective tissue for programming and assembling agents.

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"We can interact with AI through natural language, right? Well that also carries over to agents," said Shah .

"The API, so to speak, of an agent is actually natural language. You don't have to learn this other language to be able to make use of these agents, whether you're doing it as a human or you're doing it as another agent. That unlocks a new level of interoperability that I think has historically been hard to accomplish." 

Shah said the greater significance of agentic AI, and networks of collaborating agents, is a reinvention of CRM software. 

"We saw lots of innovation back in the cloud days," said Shah, referring to the 2006 to 2007 time frame when cloud computing first burst on the scene, "which was the last big kind of 'transformative impacts every industry kind of thing' -- you know, cloud CRMs emerged, and have taken over now pretty much every kinda major CRM."

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Today's "paradigm shift" in CRM will be AI-led. "We're going to have now a new kind of paradigm, which is going to be an AI-based smart CRM," said Shah. 

That shift means the competitive battle in CRM, between Hubspot and Salesforce and others, said Shah, will be about which "platforms" provide the best use of agents for both users and developers.

"One of the reasons I'm personally very excited about this, kind-of, AI transition, is that now we're going to see a whole new generation of developers that are going to be seeking a platform on which to build their ideas, saying, 'Hey, I want to build something for marketing or sales,'" he said.

"Which CRM platform will they choose? And, now, I think we have an opportunity to build this kind of new mindshare within the developer ecosystem to say, 'Hey, now it's not about Web-based applications; agents are the new apps,' right? That's the new thing that people will be building. So, that's exciting."