Conversational Swarms of Humans and AI Agents enable Hybrid Collaborative Decision-making

Conversational Swarm Intelligence (CSI) is an AIpowered communication and collaboration technology that allows large, networked groups (of potentially unlimited size) to hold thoughtful conversational deliberations in real-time. Inspired by the efficient decision-making dynamics of fish schools, CSI divides a human population into a set of small subgroups connected by AI agents. This enables the full group to hold a unified conversation. In this study, groups of 25 participants were tasked with selecting a roster of players in a real Fantasy Baseball contest. A total of 10 trials were run using CSI. In half the trials, each subgroup was augmented with a fact-providing AI agent referred to herein as an “Infobot.” The Infobot was loaded with a wide range of MLB statistics. The human participants could query the Infobot the same way they would query other persons in their subgroup. Results show that when using CSI, the 25-person groups outperformed 72% of individually surveyed participants and showed significant intelligence amplification versus the mean score $(p=0.016)$. The CSI-enabled groups also significantly outperformed the most popular picks across the collected surveys for each daily contest $(p\lt0.001)$. The CSI sessions that used Infobots scored slightly higher than those that did not, but it was not statistically significant in this study. That said, 85% of participants agreed with the statement “Our decisions were stronger because of information provided by the Infobot,” and only $\mathbf{4 \%}$ disagreed. In addition, deliberations that used Infobots showed significantly less variance $(p=0.039)$ in conversational content across members. This suggests that Infobots promoted more balanced discussions in which fewer members dominated the dialog. This may be because the infobot enabled participants to confidently express opinions with the support of factual data.