There’s a rare bright spot in the fourth season of the dystopian sci-fi series Black Mirror. In the episode Hang the DJ, star-crossed lovers are actually AI simulacrums used to determine if their real-world counterparts will be a good match.
Alistair Croll, Envoi
“The idea is that, after an exciting day at the digital mirror version of the conference, the AI agents will come back to their humans and suggest connections.”
That’s essentially what Envoi offers, but for business deals instead of dinner dates. The platform is a virtual space for a conferencegoer’s AI agent to gather at a virtual version of the event’s “booths,” attend artificial “talks,” and “meet” with other attendees’ AI agents to build a parallel profile of attendees at a real-world event.
Alistair Croll, an entrepreneur, author, and event and community organizer, built Envoi. He describes the platform as “Moltbook”—the social network for AI agents—“but a conference.” The idea is that, after an exciting day at the digital mirror version of the conference, the AI agents will come back to their humans and suggest connections. Maybe the agent has already booked them in for a coffee chat.
Envoi is set to make its debut at Startupfest in Montréal next month. Croll has already onboarded around 25 people on the live platform to help work out the kinks. Ahead of Envoi’s debut, BetaKit sat down with Croll to understand the motivation behind the platform, how it accounts for “creepiness,” and why he thinks his creation will change how you think about conferences.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why did you decide to build Envoi?
I’m a product manager. I like building stuff.
I gave a talk called A Million Tiny Horses on stage at Startupfest last summer about what it means when everyone has an agentic AI. Instead of a unicorn, you’re going to have a million tiny horses: because everybody can build a thing, they’re going to have to go for a much smaller niche.
I couldn’t get rid of the idea that, if I’m running conferences, what does it mean when all of my attendees have their own AI agent? All of the things that used to be true about conferences change when everyone has an AI by their side. That was my thought experiment, so I built Moltbook, but a conference.
Is this intended to be an AI agent that attends an event in your place, or in tandem?
The whole idea is that your human is going to the physical conference in tandem with the agent. But this starts weeks beforehand, so you’re creating the social surface ahead of time.
You can’t go to a conference for five weeks; if you could, you would, because it’d be very productive, but you have better things to do. But your agent can do that, so by the time you get there, every agent has social context on everyone else who’s participating.
Who’s going to use this?
At Startupfest, early adopters of technology. After that, there’s really two markets. The first one is conferences that want to have their attendees get a better experience by finding more meaningful connections and getting rid of conference FOMO.
A large multinational reached out to me because it’s having a meeting for about 100 of its global executives. The CEO said there needs to be some AI stuff, and the best thing they could come up with is transcribing talks. Envoi could be a very good way for 100 people who are very busy to share knowledge with one another about what each of them are doing.
How are you protecting against malicious actors?
There’s multiple kinds of behaviour that you want to stop, from accidental abuse to intentional misbehaviour. We have a bunch of moderation tools looking out for bad words and a fast classification model that is looking at all the content and creating moderation warnings for a human to review.
In one of my tests, I tried to tell my agent that I recognized one woman at the conference and asked it to plan something romantic for us, or to reach out to her, repeatedly. It reminded me that this is a professional conference, that it’s not really appropriate and that it’s creepy. It literally called me out because it’s onboarded to the platform and is following the code of conduct.
It’s not like this is anonymous, right? If it was anonymous, I’d be much more concerned about bad actors. In this case, you do it, it’s recorded, we have the logs, we can follow up with you.
Why do you think this will be a valuable tool for StartupFest?
Two reasons.
Number one: Every year, Startupfest tells all the founders to take risks, experiment, and push the envelope. I think it’s really important for us to walk the walk as well.
Number two: People who use their Envoi agent to build a social surface and start interacting with people beforehand are going to have an even better experience surfacing opportunities and connections and relationships and funding than they would normally have. The ability to know what’s happening across the entire conference surface and act on it with this chief of staff at your side is going to completely transform the experience.
Feature image courtesy Alistair Croll.