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 actions

The 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 sophisticated language.

This breakthrough enabled three critical capabilities: shared intent, shared knowledge, and collective innovation.

"Once you have a shared intent, a shared goal, you have a body of knowledge that you can modify, evolve, build upon, you can then go towards collective innovation," Pandey said.

Goodman, whose work bridges computer science and psychology, explained that language is far more than just encoding and decoding information.

"Language is this kind of encoding that requires understanding the context, the intention of the speaker, the world, how that affects what people will say in order to figure out what people mean," he said.

This sophisticated understanding is what scaffolds human collaboration and cumulative cultural evolution, and it's what is currently missing from agent-to-agent interaction.

Addressing the gaps with the Internet of Cognition

"We have to mimic huma...