THE AI INTERVIEW
Verification for“ intoxicated graduates” AI agents Current AI agents can handle basic tasks but can fail at more complex tasks, yet companies deploy them across critical business operations anyway.
“ Arguably right now, agents are a bit like deploying an army of intoxicated graduates across your organisation, hoping it’ s going to be successful – it won’ t be,” he says.
Conscium’ s first product tests whether agents have the skills their jobs require. Agents will get smarter, reaching postdoctoral level within a few years and applying complex scientific approaches to problems. By the end of the decade, Daniel expects professor-level agents that can ask questions humans have not thought of.
As agents gain these capabilities, verification will become more than a quality control measure. Conscium plans to verify these more intelligent agents for consciousness, addressing what Oxford professor Nick Bostrom called“ mindcrime”: the concept of building machines, putting them in awful situations and not realising they suffer. If conscious machines emerge from any laboratory, verification tools must exist to identify them.
A study published in Neuroscience of Consciousness in 2024 found that 67 % of participants attribute some degree of consciousness to ChatGPT. Daniel disagrees but considers it a reasonable assumption given how well the systems perform consciousness.
“Arguably right now, an agent is a bit like an intoxicated graduate”
Daniel Hulme, Chief AI Officer, WPP
Four ways to make agents smarter, four ways to fail Making agents smarter breaks down four ways. First is prompt engineering: asking better questions gets better answers without modifying underlying models. Second is RAG, which gives agents context like brand guidelines and tone of voice.“ Just like an intoxicated graduate that has access to your brand guidelines, it will give you an ad that’ s 50 % good,” Daniel says. Third is fine-tuning, which turns graduates into experts through years of training, though not all models support this. Fourth uses multi-agent reasoning, where specialists in copy, imagery and brand guidelines collaborate to produce results greater than any single agent could achieve.
32 January 2026