This is the first in a 9 part series on the BotChain, a network for autonomous agents on the blockchain. The links below will be updated as the posts go live over time. You can also check out the IIA’s audit guidelines for AI, which align with where BotChain is going.

Talla was started with the goal of building digital workers. We know this is a decades long process, so we frequently have far out discussions, as we assume we will still be working on Talla in 20 years. Our current product is a bot/knowledgebase combo that, when you create a new KB entry, is automatically tagged in ways that make it easy to create machine learning models. We use this to easily add the new data to a chatbot brain, provide better search via neural information retrieval methods, and help build models for routing knowledge and information proactively around organizations.

In the summer of 2016, when we started getting some customer requests to support more than one bot on our platform, we realized that in the future, we are likely to be in a world where organizations have many bots (or autonomous agents, we use them interchangeably) floating around doing work. What happens when two agents need to talk to each other? How do we know what they say, and how do we track back a conversation that goes awry and needs to be corrected? We decided a blockchain between bot companies would be a great way to support this use case, but that we didn’t have the bandwidth to do the work then.

But the idea, once stuck in our heads, continued to grow.

Fast forward to spring of 2017 and the ICO phenomenon. We started to think that, as blockchains were really interesting to people, maybe it was the right time to pull that idea off the shelf and dig in more deeply. And digging in led us to some really interesting things to think about. We spent some time thinking through other ideas, and so, for reference, below are some of the use cases BotChain was designed to solve long term.

Bot identity and validation. — One thing that happened pretty quickly is that bots started to be spoofed, often to steal crytpocurrency during ICOs. Using a blockchain to validate bot ownership, on a distributed bot network that the bot companies all control and participate in as a group but no one fully owns, makes a lot of sense. As bots become more pervasive, and engage in more cross-company transactions, it becomes clear that there will need to be a validation mechanism. Bot audit and compliance. — When employees are part of compliance processes like SOC2, HIPAA, or ISO standards, they have to demonstrate compliance, and those demonstrations have to pass an audit. As bots start to do work for us, and are part of these processes, how will they demonstrate compliance? How will they be audited? The digital certificates we are generating to store on the BotChain are proof of what happened in every bot instance. Control boundaries of autonomy — When reinforcement learning models are deployed in bots, and their autonomy grows, how do we know they will do what we want them to do? OpenAI has demonstrated that sometimes reward functions are faulty and lead agents astray in surprising ways. Recording everything on a blockchain, requiring voting standards for certain actions, this all helps contain and limit bots to a certain level of acceptable autonomy and decision making. Shared Marketplace for Bot Add Ons — In general, every B2B company has their own marketplace. What if the bot ecosystem can evolve differently? A shared standard and open marketplace controlled by no one but influenced by all bot providers is only possible with a distributed ecosystem, and a blockchain is perfect for that.

We decided to build the BotChain because we realized these use cases were going to be critical to solve for long term adoption of bots doing real work in large enterprises. You can read our draft whitepaper here. Stay tuned as we dive into these issues in more detail in future posts.