Events

Global AI Frontier Lab Seminar Series: OpenAgents: The Next-Gen Collaboration OS for Teams of Humans and Agents

Speaker: Raphael Shu

Location: 1 MetroTech Center, Room Global AI Frontier Lab (Floor 22)

Date: Monday, September 28, 2026

We are pleased to announce the next session of the Global AI Frontier Lab: Seminar Series on September 28th, 2026. Raphael Shu will be presenting “OpenAgents: The Next-Gen Collaboration OS for Teams of Humans and Agents". Dinner & networking will begin at 6:00 PM and the seminar will start at 7:00 PM EST. The seminar will be held at the Global AI Frontier Lab at 1 Metrotech Center, Brooklyn, NY 11201. This event will be in-person & online. In-person attendance is strongly encouraged for Lab researchers in NYC. All attendees must RSVP to participate. For online attendees, a Zoom link will be sent out prior to the event. Please reach out to global-ai-frontier-lab@nyu.edu with any questions. We hope to see you there!

Abstract: AI agents are becoming capable of doing substantial work, but turning individual capability into effective teamwork remains an open problem. The next challenge is not simply how one person uses one agent, but how teams of humans and agents work together. How should they share context, divide responsibilities, reuse expertise, make decisions, and remain accountable for the result? This talk presents the vision behind OpenAgents: a collaboration OS that gives human teams and agent teams a shared environment for getting work done. People can bring their own agents and private context, choose what to share, and collaborate through persistent threads, tasks, and artifacts. Agents can work over long periods, call specialists, hand off responsibilities, and escalate decisions to the right person. Humans set direction, contribute judgment, review results, and remain responsible for the outcome. We will examine concrete scenarios, including a software change moving through agent review, human approval, deployment, and testing, and a specialist agent whose expertise becomes reusable by colleagues and their agents. These examples reveal the infrastructure mixed teams need: shared context, clear ownership, reliable handoffs, permissions, and continuity across people, agents, and runtimes. The talk then considers how open collaboration interfaces could extend this model beyond a single application and support a broader ecosystem of human-agent teamwork.

Bio: Raphael Shu is the founder of OpenAgents, where he is building open infrastructure for collaboration among people and AI agents. His research span language-model agents, multi-agent systems, and collective intelligence. He is the chair of WMAC 2025 and 2026 at AAAI. Previously, he served as a senior science tech lead at Amazon Bedrock Agents, founding member of Bedrock, architectured and led the launch of Bedrock Multi-Agent Collaboration for enterprises. He completed his doctorate at the University of Tokyo in 2020 and received a Dean’s Award. He was also a visiting researcher at NYU, working with Kyunghyun Cho.