A village, its agents & a beach in Goa
Where Is
Everybody?
At Edge City in Mandrem, I found people quietly getting on with things while technology did some of the running around. I came away with new connections and questions I had never thought to ask.
There is a particular kind of worry that comes with arriving ahead of a Minister and finding hardly anyone around.
My colleague, the OSD for IT, and I, as OSD for Tourism, were preparing for Hon’ble Minister Shri Rohan A. Khaunte’s visit to Edge City. People were quietly working. I was mentally counting possible interactions.
Where was everybody?
As the visit came together, so did the groups. The coordination was already happening on their platform. I had been looking for activity in entirely the wrong place.
Anchored at Riva Beach Resort, this first Indian edition extended across Mandrem, with workshops and thought experiments happening in different spaces. A village has many doors. I had walked through one and wondered why everyone wasn’t inside.
Our hosts had help we couldn’t see.
We were shown that there were around 650 participants, about 450 with personal AI agents. While our hosts took us around, their agents were working for them: talking to other agents, finding shared interests and exploring potential meetings.
The sorting and matching could happen in the background. Their humans could step in and decide whether to meet.
Let AI do the heavy lifting. You take the final decision.
That was the part that excited me. We spend so much time getting to the conversation. Here was technology helping people get there while leaving them free to be present with us.
And then there were the stars.
★ ★ ★
On the platform, each person received three stars a day to give other members, for whatever they appreciated about an interaction. The recognition accumulated on a leaderboard.
I could immediately imagine versions of this in government and corporate offices. Someone helps you resolve a problem, makes an introduction or simply takes the trouble to explain something. You have a small, immediate way to acknowledge it.
Could people try and rig it with their friends? Certainly. But the idea stayed with me: what might change if helpfulness became more visible in the places we work?
The people who carry one conversation into another.
I met Edge City’s co-founders Janine Leger and Timour Kosters, Head of Partnerships & Scouting Telamon Ardavanis, and Chief of Staff Dawn Musil. The connections we left with were part of what made the visit memorable.
So was Mariella Torres of Ground Floor. If I recall her account correctly, three local businesses had registered when she left the US. Once on the ground, with support from our local ecosytems, they had worked with more than 60. A reminder that some connections need people on the ground to bring them to life.
A workshop on women and startups brought up neurodivergent women and their needs. As a man, it was something I had never really considered. Conversations about filmmaking and AI opened other doors.
At one point, someone introduced himself to the Minister as a “consciousness theorist”. That was a new introduction for me. Soon we were discussing whether AI could have consciousness, and what that might even mean.
In a lighter exchange, we wandered into the idea of Akashic record keepers as agents. Could our agents speak to those agents and pull up our records? The cosmic helpdesk, perhaps.
We were joking, of course. But I enjoyed how easily the conversation travelled between technology, philosophy and spiritual ideas. Nobody needed to arrive with a finished answer before exploring a question.
To participate, I had to keep my own mind open long enough to understand how they were thinking: laterally, digitally, and with enormous curiosity about what AI might help them discover.
And this was a village in the fullest sense. Children, parents, old friends, newcomers. People returning from earlier editions and people finding their feet. Even the burning of Ravana had its place in community life.
Digital coordination helped people find each other. There was still room for the chance encounters, humour and human curiosity that made meeting worthwhile.
What interests me is the person who can move between these circles. Someone hears an idea among researchers and sees its relevance to a local business. Someone understands a young builder’s experiment and can explain why it matters inside a government office. They carry energy from one conversation into the next.
That is a role I find myself drawn to. It means learning the digital world these communities navigate so naturally, while bringing an understanding of how institutions work.
By evening, the community had gathered on the beach. I had met people whose work I understood, people whose work I was still trying to understand, and people I wanted to introduce to someone in another circle.
That last part stayed with me. An idea heard here could start a useful conversation elsewhere, provided we were willing to listen, learn and carry it across.
I had arrived with a very practical question:
“Where is everybody?”
I left with a much more interesting one:
“What else am I not seeing?”
