Experts Discuss the Missing Layer Between Agent Connectivity and True Collaboration

Vijoy Pandey and Noah Goodman explore how to enable AI agents to truly think together with shared intent, knowledge, and purpose.

Published on Feb. 9, 2026

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Today's AI challenge is about agent coordination, context, and collaboration. While protocols have solved basic connectivity, experts say agents still can't really "think together" with the contextual understanding, negotiation, and shared purpose that true collective intelligence requires. Vijoy Pandey of Cisco and Noah Goodman of Stanford discussed how to move beyond just coordinated actions to a new kind of distributed intelligence that keeps humans firmly in the loop.

Why it matters

Achieving collective intelligence among AI agents, not just coordinated actions, is seen as a critical next step toward a new kind of distributed intelligence that maintains human involvement. Experts say this will require infrastructure to enable shared intent, coordination, and the evolution of collective context - what they call the "Internet of Cognition."

The details

Pandey and Goodman explained that while individual human intelligence emerged around 300,000 years ago, true collective intelligence didn't arise until 70,000 years ago with the advent of sophisticated language. This enabled shared intent, shared knowledge, and collective innovation. They say current agent-to-agent interaction is missing this level of contextual understanding and shared purpose. To address this, they propose a three-layer architecture: protocols for intent sharing and coordination, a shared memory system for evolving collective context, and cognition engine accelerators with necessary guardrails.

  • Humans became individually intelligent roughly 300,000 years ago.
  • True collective human intelligence emerged around 70,000 years ago with sophisticated language.

The players

Vijoy Pandey

SVP and GM of Outshift by Cisco.

Noah Goodman

Stanford professor and co-founder of Humans&.

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What they’re saying

“We have to mimic human evolution. In addition to agents getting smarter and smarter, just like individual humans, we need to build infrastructure that enables collective innovation, which implies sharing intent, coordination, and then sharing knowledge or context and evolving that context.”

— Vijoy Pandey, SVP and GM of Outshift by Cisco (VentureBeat)

“Our goal is not longer and longer autonomy. It's better and better collaboration. Humans& is building agents with deep social understanding: entities that know who knows what, can foster collaboration, and put the right specialists in touch at the right time.”

— Noah Goodman, Stanford professor and co-founder of Humans& (VentureBeat)

The takeaway

Achieving true collective intelligence among AI agents, with shared intent, knowledge, and purpose, is seen as a critical step toward a new kind of distributed intelligence that keeps humans firmly involved. Experts say this will require building infrastructure to enable agents to "think together" across organizational boundaries.