As recent events have revealed, it is not easy to do the work of democracy. Some critics will argue that technology is making it worse. However, some startups hope that AI will help fill some differences rather than expanding.
“One day, I had an A-HA moment when I realized I was asking AI to explain something like 5 years old,” Tomy Lorsch, co-founder and CEO of ComplexChaos, told TechCrunch. “What if we use it as a facilitator to help people understand each other and find a common basis?”
He and co-founder Maya Ben Dror are developing tools to help people reach consensus. One of their first test cases involved climate negotiations, but what the issue is really not the issue. Their goal is to promote cooperation and reduce the time it takes for the group to agree.
“Everyone is building software for collaborations like Slack, Google Docs and more,” says Lorsch. “Cooperation is a different work.”
Promoting cooperation doesn’t work, he said. Trained facilitators usually help you spend time with the group and reach consensus, but the process can be slower when negotiations and preparations occur in different rooms.
Lorsch was supported by a recent LLM developed by Google, known as the Habermas Machine. This was explicitly developed with that goal in mind. “It’s basically an AI that generates group consensus statements that people feel expressed in both the majority and the minority perspective,” he said.
Lorsch and Ben Dror recently tried out the startup’s tools to help young representatives of nine African countries prepare for climate-related negotiations at the UN campus in Bonn, Germany. The tool incorporates both Google’s Habermas Machine and Openai’s ChatGpt to generate questions, create conversation goals, and help you summarize long documentation.
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According to Ben Droll, the goal is to help representatives reach consensus as a block before they begin negotiations with others.
Ideally, this tool will also help you speed things up during negotiations. If a block or representative from a group of Aligned countries encounters new information during the course of a large negotiation session, they often need to be reorganized to process the new information. “Blocks are usually the reason negotiations have to stop. Blocks have to go out, renegotiate, relocate and then come back. ComplexChaos hopes that the tool will help reduce that time.
In a trial with representatives from African countries, ComplexChaos said participants reported a 60% reduction in time spent adjusting, with 91% of participants saying that AI tools helped them see perspectives they otherwise missed.
ComplexChaos promotes collaboration tools to businesses, including high-tech companies and large consultants. “AI strategic planning is basically the same issue,” says Lorsch. “Most companies’ annual strategic planning processes take approximately three months per year, including the whole team, across the team, and more, through the negotiations before and after, multi-tier, and across teams.”
But Roche and Bendrore are most enthusiastic when talking about climate negotiations.
“If AI can shorten these processes and simplify them, we’ll be very good. Not only for the climate, but also for sustainability, the big challenges we face,” Ben Droar said.
