Today’s AI challenge is about agent coordination, context, and collaboration. How do you enable them to truly think together, with all the contextual understanding, negotiation, and shared purpose that entails? It’s a critical next step toward a new kind of distributed intelligence that keeps humans firmly in the loop.At the latest stop on VentureBeat’s AI Impact Series, Vijoy Pandey, SVP and GM of Outshift by Cisco, and Noah Goodman, Stanford professor and co-founder of Humans&, sat down to talk about how to move beyond agents that just connect to agents that are steeped in collective intelligence.The need for collective intelligence, not coordinated actionsThe core challenge, Pandey said, is that “agents today can connect together, but they can’t really think together.” While protocols like MCP and A2A have solved basic connectivity, and AGNTCY tackles the problems of discovery, identity management to inter-agent communication and observability, they’ve only addressed the equivalent of making a phone call between two people who don’t speak the same language. But Pandey’s team has identified something deeper than technical plumbing: the need for agents to achieve collective intelligence, not just coordinated actions.How shared intent and shared knowledge enable collective innovation To understand where multi-agent AI needs to go, both speakers pointed to the history of human intelligence. While humans became individually intelligent roughly 300,000 years ago, true collective intelligence didn’t emerge until around 70,000 years ago with the advent of sophisticat …
