“Transparency has to be built into the structure so that you know where the decision is made, what authorizations are given, and have an audit trail visible so you can always see what is going on.”

–Ross Dawson

About Ross Dawson

Ross Dawson is a futurist, keynote speaker, strategy advisor, author, and host of Amplifying Cognition podcast. He is Chairman of the Advanced Human Technologies group of companies and Founder of Humans + AI startup Informivity. He has delivered keynote speeches and strategy workshops in 33 countries and is the bestselling author of 5 books, most recently Thriving on Overload.

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Collaborating with AI Agents

Intelligent AI Delegation

Agentic Interactions

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Ross Dawson

What you will learn

How human-AI teams outperform human-only teams in productivity and efficiency
The crucial role of understanding AI strengths and limitations when designing collaborative workflows
Ways AI collaboration can lead to output homogenization and strategies to preserve human creativity
Key principles of intelligent delegation within multi-agent AI systems, including dynamic assessment and trust
Understanding accountability, transparency, and auditability in decision-making with autonomous AI agents
How user intent and ‘machine fluency’ impact the effectiveness of AI agents in economic and organizational contexts
The emergence of an ‘agentic economy’ and its implications for fairness, capability gaps, and representation
Counterintuitive findings on AI-mediated negotiation, particularly advantages for women, and what it reveals about AI-human interaction

Episode Resources

Transcript

Ross Dawson: This episode is a little bit different. Instead of doing an interview with somebody remarkable, as usual, today I’m going to just share a bit of an update and then share insights from three recent research papers that dig into something which I think is exceptionally important, which is how humans work with AI agentic systems. And we’ll look at a few different layers of that, from how small humans plus agent teams work through to how we can delegate decisions to AI through to some of the broader implications.

But first, a bit of an update.

2026 seems to be moving exceptionally fast. It’s a very interesting time to be alive, and I think it’s pretty even hard to see what the end of this year is going to look like.

So for me, I am doing my client work as usual. So I’ve got keynotes around the world on usually various things related to AI, the future of AI, humans plus AI, and so on. A few industry-specific ones in financial services and so on.

And also doing some work as an advisor on AI transformation programs, so helping organizations and their leaders to frame the pathways, drawing on my AI roadmap framework in how it is you look at the phases, mapping those out, working out the issues, and being able to guide and coach the leaders to do that effectively.

But the rest of my time is focused on three ventures, and I’ll share some more about these later on. But these are fairly evidently tied to my core interests.

Fractious is our AI for strategy app. So this was really building a way in which we can capture the detailed nuance of the strategic thinking of leaders of the organization, to disambiguate it, to clarify it, and enable that to then be built into strategic options, strategic hypotheses, and to be able to evolve effectively.

So that’ll be in beta soon. Please reach out if you’re interested in being part of the beta program, and that’ll go to market. So that’s deeply involved in that.

We also have our Thought Weaver software, rebuilding previous software which had already built on AI-augmented thinking workflows. So again, that’ll be going to beta. That’s more an individual tool that will be going into beta in the next weeks.

So again, go to Thought Weaver. Actually, don’t—the website isn’t updated yet—but I’ll let you know when it’s out, or keep posted for updates on that.

And also building an enterprise cou...

Ross Dawson on Humans + AI Agentic Systems (AC Ep34)