Making democracy work is messy, but one startup thinks artificial intelligence could make it smoother.
Complex Chaos, co-founded by Tommy Lorsch and Maya Ben Dror, is developing AI tools designed not just for collaboration but for cooperation, helping groups understand one another, find common ground, and reach consensus faster.
“I had an a-ha moment when I realized people are asking AI to explain things like they’re five years old,” Lorsch told TechCrunch. “What if we use it as a facilitator to help people understand each other and find common ground?”
The startup recently tested its tool with young delegates from nine African nations as they prepared for climate-related negotiations at the UN campus in Bonn, Germany. Using both Google’s experimental Habermas Machine (built to generate group consensus statements) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the tool helped delegates set conversation goals, generate questions, and summarize long documents.
According to Complex Chaos, delegates reported a 60% reduction in coordination time, and 91% said the AI surfaced perspectives they might have otherwise overlooked.
Ben Dror said the tool could be especially valuable during negotiations, when blocs of aligned countries often need to pause, regroup, and reposition after encountering new information. “That creates a lot of friction,” she explained. “If AI can shorten these processes, simplify them, then we’d be so much better off.”
Beyond diplomacy, the startup is also pitching its tool to companies for strategic planning, a process Lorsch says can drag on for months across teams and time zones.
Related: Al Gore’s Climate Trace Launches AI Tool to Track Global Air Pollution
Still, the founders are most energized by the technology’s potential impact on climate negotiations. “For anything sustainability, for any big challenge that we’re facing,” Ben Dror said, “AI could help us get there faster.”
