Using current methods, team discussions work best in small groups of only 4 to 7 people. Unfortunately, the average Fortune 1000 company has over 30,000 employees with the average product group exceeding 500 members. So, how can large groups brainstorm together, debating and deliberating as they prioritize and converge?
It’s been a longtime goal at Unanimous AI to enable thoughtful real-time conversations among groups of any size – 40 people, 400 people, even 4000 people. This seemed impossible until we launched our Thinkscape.ai platform based on years of research into AI systems modeled on the biological principles of Swarm Intelligence. And now that we can enable real-time conversations at potentially any scale, we’ve been working with academics to validate the effectiveness for various applications.
In a recent study performed with Carnegie Mellon researchers, we tested the ability of Thinkscape to enable brainstorming at large scale. Our goal was to enable groups of 75 people to connect remotely using Thinkscape and brainstorm together in real-time, building on the ideas of others, debating the merits of solutions raised, and converging on a set of top answers for further consideration. As described in the pre-print publication here, the process was effective, efficient, and highly rated by participants.
Here are the final results comparing large-scale brainstorming in Thinkscape (via text-chat) to a traditional chat architecture as used by common tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Google Chat. As shown below, large preferred Thinkscape, reporting that it made them feel more productive, more collaborative, and most importantly, more heard. They also believed they surfaced better answers, felt more ownership, and had greater buy-in for the process. These are big wins for any large team.
So, what is the magic of Thinkscape? It’s a patented technology from Unanimous AI that combines the biological principles of Swarm Intelligence with the power of Generative AI. We call this technology Conversational Swarm Intelligence (CSI) and at the highest level, it divides any large group into an interconnected network of small groups, each with an AI Agent that weaves all the conversations together in real-time. It works remarkably well and is viable for groups of potentially any size, enabling hundreds of people to brainstorm in real-time, building on the ideas of others, debating the merits of various options, prioritizing features and functions, and quickly converging on an optimal set of solutions.
The video below explains the technology inside Thinkscape® in under 3 minutes:
For more information about this research study, see the published pre-print here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14205
For more information about Thinkscape® and its power to unlock group intelligence, visit: https://www.thinkscape.ai/
