This founder built an AI agent marketplace of actual humans

^{A week in AI is like a year in other industries. I hope these issues become your weekly source of AI information, inspiration, and ideas. If we haven’t met before, I’m Amanda Smith. I write about AI and the fascinating folks who are building in this brave new world.}

Good morning. Most people revert to the big lab LLMs to help them navigate tough conversations. But those answers are generic, artificially generated, and often irresponsible. 

Just imagine being able to talk to an AI agent that has been trained by an individual who has been vetted as a verified communicator. That’s the use case this week’s founder had in mind when he set out to create a text assistant companion for communication. 

Let’s dive in. 

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Byron Hord started out in television writing, before moving into world-building for video games. Hord tried his hand at game design himself during Covid but found himself in “development purgatory.” At one industry event, he was busy trying to pitch and promote his games, but his friend kept texting him for relationship advice. “I made a joke at that event that we need a Grammarly for texting,” he said. 

A buddy of Hord’s reached out to him a few days later saying how great of an idea that was. Two weeks later, Hord had linked up with a software developer and piloted the first version of Smoothly, an AI companion app. 

V1 was completely focused on dating and trained to emulate Hord. He wanted to add a layer of emotion to texting, while making himself available in the way of an AI agent when he was busy. 

He’d always been interested in blockchain technology, so when the developer skated, Hord connected with Verona – verification infrastructure technology that adds a trust and safety layer that most AI apps don’t have. Hord joined their ecosystem program and expanded Smoothly into a marketplace of AI agents that cover professional, social and romantic conversation support. 

Every AI agent (verified communicators) on the Smoothly platform is a real person, who has passed a clinically-endorsed interpersonal competence assessment. When someone's stuck on what to say in a text, email, or DM that matters, Smoothly gives them the words, from an AI agent, shaped by someone who's proven they have the relevant experience. 

Verified communicators train their AI agent and earn money every single time their agent is used, while everyday users get a verified human behind every response and a rationale for each suggestion. Also, without worrying about the model selling or leaking their sensitive data, given Verona is a decentralized network of verified information powering the next gen of AI agents. 

Given Hord’s gaming roots, he wanted to make Smoothly a creator-driven platform, with IRL events where people come together to complete the assessments and launch their AI agent. 

The assessment measures how an individual would respond across six dimensions of communication competence. In terms of training Smoothly, Hord said he was able to feed it 40 years of communication research that went into forming the assessment. 

“This research funnel basically sanitizes each of these scenarios and how these people respond to get a certain number that based on the density of whatever their motivation is, we get a certain number that would qualify these people to be good communicators,” Hord said, keeping his training tight-lipped, not to give too much away. 

This footnote is on the Smoothly website: The Interpersonal Communication Competence framework draws on the published research of Spitzberg & Cupach (1984), Mayer, Salovey & Caruso (1997), Reis, Lemay & Clark (2022), and Altman & Taylor (1973). 

Verified communicators are rewarded a badge that exists on-chain credentials that people can earn from whenever their agent is used, via Verona’s infrastructure. There are three revenue tiers for creators: 35%, 37% and 40%. Users purchase a token bundle ranging from $5-200, which is split between the creator and platform. Creators get paid out once a month based on the amount of usage of their agent. 

There’s a profile card for each AI agent and the goal is for users to build a relationship with the agent/s they communicate with. For example, allowing people to run sessions with their users. 

Hord wants to make it so that the only way to become a verified communicator is in real life, so hosting events in cities across the U.S. to streamline and gamify growth. While Hord is still a solo builder, he does lean on contractors and plans to assemble a board of advisors. 

On advice for other AI founders, he says to get sleep now because we’re still at the start of the AI revolution. 

“In order to get the product to the optimal place, it’s important that you actually own the AI, own the work, and truly understand what your product is – because AI is not just the cliff notes of industry. It’s much bigger than that.”

If one of these stories stuck with you, I’d love to hear which one.

Speak soon,
Amanda

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