The Searls Group and Doc Searls are central to the 'customer-side' of the AI agent ecosystem. Their primary contribution is the 'Intention Economy' framework, which provides the economic and philosophical justification for personal AI agents. In this view, agents are not just productivity tools but are 'sovereign' representatives of the individual, capable of signaling market intent without surrendering privacy to centralized platforms.
They are active in the 'Identity and Sovereignty' layer of the agent stack. Through the Internet Identity Workshop and ProjectVRM, they advocate for the standards that allow agents to be interoperable and truly autonomous. By championing open-source agent projects like Kwaai, they are pushing the ecosystem toward a future where agents work for the user, effectively flipping the power dynamic of the current web from 'captured' users to 'agent-empowered' customers.
The Searls Group is the primary vehicle for the work of Doc Searls, a figure whose career spans the transition from traditional Silicon Valley advertising to the modern debates over digital identity and personal data sovereignty. Searls is best known as a co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, the 1999 work that famously predicted markets would become conversations. Through his firm, he has spent the subsequent decades building the theoretical and technical framework for what he calls the Intention Economy. This model suggests a market where customers notify vendors of their needs through their own tools, rather than being targeted by invasive tracking systems.
At the center of this work is ProjectVRM, a research initiative originally launched at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center. VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is the conceptual inverse of CRM. While CRM helps companies manage their customers, VRM provides customers with the means to manage their relationships with companies. This work focuses on creating standards and tools that allow individuals to assert their own terms of service and share data selectively. The Searls Group provides the strategic consulting necessary to translate these academic and technical concepts into practical applications for industry and non-profits like Customer Commons.
For the Intention Economy to function, users must have a stable, independent digital identity. Searls is a co-founder of the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW), a twice-yearly gathering in Silicon Valley that is the primary venue for developing decentralized identity standards. Since 2005, this community has worked on protocols like OpenID and various self-sovereign identity (SSI) frameworks. The Searls Group is active in these circles, advocating for identity solutions that do not depend on central authorities or 'walled garden' platforms.
This focus on identity is a prerequisite for the emerging AI agent economy. Without a secure way for an agent to represent a user's identity and preferences across different services, the automation of commerce remains limited to single-platform silos. Searls' work provides the blueprint for how these agents might operate in an open ecosystem, using standardized 'intent' signals to negotiate with vendors on behalf of the user.
While much of Searls' early work focused on the web and mobile eras, his recent focus is the shift toward Personal AI. He is the Chief Intention Officer of Kwaai, an open-source project building a personal AI operating system. This represents the technical realization of the goals laid out in his 2012 book, The Intention Economy. By shifting from passive browser-based interfaces to proactive agents, the customer finally gains the 'tools of their own' that Searls has championed.
Currently based in Bloomington, Indiana, following a long tenure in California and at Harvard, Searls remains a prolific blogger and commentator. The Searls Group functions less as a traditional agency and more as a high-level strategic advisory for organizations navigating the collapse of the advertising-funded web and the rise of agentic, privacy-first commerce. Their influence is found less in specific software products and more in the protocols and mental models that define how humans and machines interact in digital markets.
A research project developing tools for Vendor Relationship Management.
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