The AI Agent Queue Conundrum

Brian (0:01)

Hey, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to another Saturday Conundrum. I'm Brian, one of the co-hosts of The Daily AI Show. And every single Saturday, I bring you a brand new conundrum. So I know I have recency bias. I'm fully aware that if you've been listening to the Saturday episodes that I have said this many times before, but this might be my favorite conundrum.

I'm going to call this one the AIQ conundrum, as in like in a line Q, not the letter Q.

It was formerly had a longer name. You might hear that with our two AI co-hosts. But I think the AIQ conundrum is a better name for it. Okay, what am I talking about? What am I even getting into today? Well, the reason why this is one of my favorites or maybe my favorite is because this is something we can definitely all relate to. This is something we've all experienced. Now, maybe you haven't gone to a recent concert. Maybe you haven't gotten a recent reservation. But the chances are, if you're listening to this, you've made some reservation where demand outpace supply, meaning it was an RV spot that you wanted to camp at. It was a dinner reservation. It was a concert. It was, well, you fill in the blank, right? Thousand other different varieties of this.

This conundrum is about what we all know is happening. We've all seen the success of like Muse, but we also, if you follow our show, you know how much we talk about agents and personal agents.

It's been a topic of many different conundrums before this because just to have one conundrum about personal agents does not even cover just a sliver of what it's going to be. But in this case, we're talking about that queue, that line, that place in the place in line that says whether you get the concert tickets or not. So in my life right now, that would be for Olivia Rodrigo tickets with my 15-year-old daughter. It is the hottest ticket around, at least in her life. I'm sure there's bigger ones. It is similar to the Taylor Swift tour, the Aeros tour and stuff like that. And as you can imagine, very, very hard to get tickets. Now, today towards the near future, let's just assume that everybody has a working personal agent. This is an agent kind of like a muse that knows what your budget limits are, knows what you're willing to spend, has maybe permission up to a certain amount to spend money on your behalf or to jump in some lines to see if you can get tickets. And that sounds great on a lot of areas, right? One side of this conundrum is really easy. Both of them are easy, but the first side makes sense.

Fantastic. I can remember being a kid and asking my mom, as I was in school, to go stand outside Turtle's Music to stand in line for tickets because that Turtle's Music had a Ticketmaster counter. And yeah, I'm old enough that that was how we were buying tickets. So I remember it. I remember the pain of that and being like, how am I supposed to do this? I'm in school nowadays. It's how am I supposed to do this? I'm in work or my daughter is like, how am I supposed to do this? Even though everything is online, you still have to be present. So the idea of having a personal agent who has authority to go stand in that line for me is great. That sounds great. In fact, I think it sounds great if we all have them. Nothing wrong with that. Here's the problem with it. That could be the problem with it because we all are all gonna have this level of personal agents available to us. Whether, I mean, some of us will decide to use them. Some of them will run the opposite direction, but regardless, it's gonna be a thing. And so you go, hey, you know, I know we're all fighting against these bots and there's so many other issues with, you know, Ticketmaster and people wanna burn them to the ground for various reasons because they can't get the tickets and it feels like a monopoly in the whole thing. Well, the other side of this conundrum is easy to understand too, which is just simply, well, okay, hold on. If we all have agents that are able to go out and do this on our behalf, well, it might be looking for Livia Rodrigo tickets because that's really valuable to me, but maybe it also takes a shot at that really hard to get restaurant that I know my wife likes. Maybe we do like camping and it takes a shot at getting that. It knows that on, you know, two weeks from now, it's going to be the opening date at 10 a.m. for such and such a campsite, you know, in one of the national parks or something like that. And my agent goes, I mean, there's no reason I can't take a shot at doing that. So now we flood all these current reservation ticketing systems, these queues, with agents who may not be the biggest fan, right? But if I was the biggest fan of Olivia Rodrigo or Taylor Swift or whoever, you know, back in the day, no doubt or something, when I was growing up or something like that, you know, okay, well, then I'm the biggest fan. I deserve these tickets more. And to a certain case, you may go, well, I don't know, we all had our personal agents, we all took a shot and you didn't get it. And I did. Well, now we're starting to look at if everybody's doing that all the time, now it starts to become a bigger issue like latency and quite literally milliseconds. If my agent is closer to like the data center, which is closer to the connection point, so on and so forth, my ability to connect through my Ethernet port might mean the difference between my agent being able to snag that ticket and your agent not being able to snag that ticket. So now we have an imbalance. So what do we do about this? Because the conundrum is it, are we going to have personal agents? Yes. Yes, we are. We're going to have probably many of them that do many different things for us in our life. If we choose to embolden and empower them, that's not really the question. The question is, specifically, if we're talking about, why do you go about making it fair or fairer than it is today? Do you do that through lottery systems? Do you do that through verified deposits? A deposit plus a lottery where you have to put down, if I want these to deliver your Rodrigo tickets, I have to say, well, I'll put down, let's just say $200 because these tickets are nuts.