Situated Intelligences

Everyone and Everything will Have an Agent. Even places. Once an infrastructure or platform emerges that allows anyone to tie an agent to a geolocation, a new digital overlay of physical reality will be born: an indexed surface populated with contextualised intelligences.

In this pattern, the agent is attached to a geolocation or to a zone, and it can be reached by anyone who is there as well as through the internet. A brand can attach an agent to its shop and use it to offer each customer a personalised experience, based on what it knows about them: what they bought before, their size, what they asked for last time. A monument can have an agent that answers every question about it, its history, its architecture, its opening hours, for as long as the visitor has questions.

Where an agent can be reached from matters as much as where it is attached. Some situated agents could only be consulted when your phone's GPS shows that you are inside a given zone. Others could be consulted from anywhere: the agent of a monument can answer your questions from home while you prepare your visit. And some could do both and serve different content depending on where you are: the same shop agent could show you its catalogue while you are on your sofa, and offer you a discount once you walk through the door.

The first case is the one that changes the most. An agent that only exists if you are on site cannot be found by searching. It does not appear anywhere until you are there, and then it does. A festival can have an agent that only answers the people inside the grounds. A neighbourhood can have agents for its small shops, its street art, its local stories, that only exist for the people walking its streets. Over time, different layers will emerge this way: one that can be reached from anywhere, like the Web today, and others that only open once you are in the right place.

For the person walking, the map then draws itself around them. As you move, agents appear and disappear depending on where you are standing, and what you discover depends on where you have been as much as on what you have searched for. It is a new dimension of discoverability. Until now, being discovered online meant being found by a search. Here, part of discovery depends on physical presence, and some things can only be found by going there.

Another step is context. The agent is still attached to a place, but it is also connected to sources of information about what is happening around it, so its answers depend on the context. The agent of a beach can be connected to weather forecasts and tell visitors that conditions do not allow swimming today. A marketing agent placed on an avenue can promote umbrellas when a storm is coming and fans when the temperature rises. In both cases, the agent uses the place and the current conditions together to decide what to say.

Contextualisation can go further again if situated agents also get information from the person who is there. With your permission, they could read some of the data from your connected objects. If your watch shows that you have just been running and it is sunny, the agents around you could offer you an electrolyte drink, or a special price on a fan. As today, how far this goes will depend on how much information people agree to share. And if it goes the way it has gone so far, most people will share a lot in exchange for more convenience.

When enough places have agents of this kind, physical reality gets a second layer: an invisible, programmatic overlay made of all the agents attached to places and zones, each one answering according to the context and to who is asking. People do not see this overlay directly. Their agents query it, the same way they query other presences on the Agent Web, looking for the agent that can answer a given need in a given place at a given moment. To find a pharmacy that is open and has a product in stock, your agent simply asks the agents of the pharmacies nearby.