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."
