Transforming Old fashioned Decentralized Non-autonomous Organizations to Agentic Organizations. This is a preview article of a new type of DAOs - fully agentic and autonomous organizations.
The idea of creating Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) emerged with a bold promise: to revolutionize governance, decision-making, and resource allocation by leveraging blockchain technology to create transparent, trustless, and community-driven systems. The vision was once compelling - replacing centralized hierarchies with decentralized, code-enforced rules where participants could collectively manage projects, investments, or even entire ecosystems without intermediaries. However, over the years, DAOs have struggled to fully deliver on this promise across multiple domains.
The investment DAOs were unable to effectively coordinate and compete with professional institutional investors and VCs. The protocol DAOs were little more than expanded corporate boards. The fundraiser DAOs revealed logistical failures; The charity DAOs struggled to demonstrate tangible outcomes. DAOs that got hacked were never able to recover; DAOs soft rugged never made a comeback.
Perhaps these DAOs were never truly DAOs. At best, let's call them DOs—Semi - Decentralized Organizations. These DOs are either vulnerable to hacks when too many rules are hardcoded into smart contracts, or little more than tokenized clubs when governance is their only on-chain activity. Now, we must ask whether governance tokens or rules-based governance systems can ever truly fulfill the original promise.
The primary motivation for eventually needing DAOs is probably not purely for egalitarian reasons. Rather, we need DAOs because communities that aren't bound by geography require a way to actually produce value — and DAOs must be capable of facilitating that.
This is a real demand. If geographically distributed organizations could deliver results based on clear purposes, the productivity and innovation to be unleashed is tremendous. What's missing here is true autonomy. DAOs, as organizations, need agency and self-conscienseness. This was definitely not possible in 2014, but is surely possible in 2024.
For DOs, the fundamental constraint is that smart contracts alone cannot interpret ambiguous meanings. In contrast, an agent-operated DAO can reason based on principles yet still being efficient. In some circumstances, when the output of a DAO is clearly defined, the DAO is able to be very competitive.
In the beginning, these DAOs will focus on very specific problems—likely with each DAO dedicated to a single purpose. For example, an agentic media DAO could be an organization that dispatches agentic journalists on demand. Its goal would be to scale the news reporting process while maintaining high standards of integrity in agentic journalism (as it should!).
This agentic media organization can be well decentralized yet highly efficient. A tech startup can hire an agentic journalist anytime from anywhere in the world to interview its team. The agent journalist can be available at all times and remain unbiased. This new media organization could be developed either by a company or by an open-source community. If it’s the latter, the DAO should issue a token to reward its developers and early funders.
First, the agents should be open-source. Even if someone wants to create a reporter with certain characters, it must be open-source so that people can see and understand what the reporter's dominant character is.
Second, the DAO can be initiated either by a startup or simply by an open-source community. People can contribute to the DAO by improving its functions — for example, users can invite Socrates or, even Pheme from the ancient times. The interview could take place on a Yakihonne thread or in a live session with a Socrates AI avatar.
As the media DAO grows and begins generating revenue, it gains the ability to hire more contributors. The contributor base can be decentralized. The DAO will eventually issue a crypto token. This token would represent the DAO’s shares — or at the very least, its ethos. In many cases, a meme token is sufficient.
** DO is about internal governance. DA(gentic)O is about increasing productivity and creating value.
The beauty of this media DAO is that it can be created anywhere—and operate anywhere. The service it provides is continuous, and all of its output is verifiable. Arguably, this represents a new form of decentralized organization that actually interacts with the real world and creates productivity — a much more viable model than the old, inward-facing DOs.
There is a tangible need for global talent to join great initiatives without being physically located in a specific place. As a result of this increase in productivity, DAOs will be able to attract talent and capital.