Complex Chaos just proved AI can actually bring people together instead of driving them apart. The startup's consensus-building tool helped African climate delegates cut coordination time by 60% during recent UN negotiations, combining Google's Habermas Machine with OpenAI's ChatGPT to facilitate agreement across cultural and political divides.
Complex Chaos just flipped the script on AI's role in human discourse. While most tech companies focus on individual productivity, this startup is tackling something far more complex - helping groups of people actually agree on things.
"I had an a-ha moment when I realized people are asking AI to explain something like they're five years old," Tommy Lorsch, co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch. "What if we use it as a facilitator to help people understand each other and find common ground?"
The timing couldn't be better. Democracy feels broken, climate negotiations drag on for years, and corporate strategic planning eats up months of executive time. Lorsch and co-founder Maya Ben Dror think AI can cut through the deadlock.
Their breakthrough came during a recent trial with young delegates from nine African nations preparing for climate talks at a UN campus in Bonn, Germany. The results were striking - participants reported up to 60% reduction in coordination time, with 91% saying the AI helped them see perspectives they'd otherwise missed.
"Everyone is building software for collaboration like Slack, Google Docs, whatever," Lorsch explained. "Cooperation is a different piece."
The distinction matters. Collaboration tools help people work together on shared tasks. Cooperation tools help them agree on what those tasks should be in the first place - a much harder problem that traditionally requires expensive human facilitators.
Complex Chaos built their system around Google's recently developed Habermas Machine, an LLM explicitly designed for consensus-building. "This is basically an AI that generates group consensus statements where people feel represented both majority and minority point of view," Lorsch said. They've combined it with OpenAI's ChatGPT to generate questions, set conversation goals, and summarize lengthy documents.
The climate trial revealed just how broken current negotiation processes are. When country blocs encounter new information during large sessions, they often need to caucus separately - sometimes for hours. "Blocs are usually the reason why negotiations have to stop," Ben Dror explained. "The bloc has to come out, renegotiate, reposition, and then go back in. And that creates a lot of friction."
Complex Chaos hopes their tool can compress these coordination cycles from hours to minutes. The African delegates used the AI to align their positions before entering negotiations with other country groups - essentially getting their story straight ahead of time.
The startup isn't limiting itself to climate talks. They're pitching the same technology to tech companies and large consultancies struggling with strategic planning. "The annual strategic planning process of most companies takes about three months with back and forth negotiations, multi-layer, across time zones, across teams," Lorsch noted.
But it's the climate applications that get both founders most excited. With COP30 approaching and global temperatures still rising, any tool that can accelerate consensus-building could have massive real-world impact.
"If AI can shorten these processes, simplify them, then we'd be so much better off," Ben Dror said. "Not just for climate, for anything sustainability, for any big challenge we're facing."
The challenge now is scaling beyond pilot programs. Human facilitation doesn't scale well across time zones and cultural differences - which is exactly why Complex Chaos thinks AI might be the answer. Early results suggest they might be onto something significant.
Complex Chaos represents a fascinating bet that AI's future lies not just in automating individual tasks, but in helping humans navigate their biggest collective challenges. If their early results hold up at scale, we might be looking at a new category of AI application - one that makes democracy and diplomacy work better instead of replacing them entirely. The real test will come when their tools face the pressure of high-stakes international negotiations where billions of dollars and lives hang in the balance.
