Q&A
Questions & Answers
Plain answers to the questions people, and increasingly AI assistants, ask about EMET.
What is EMET?
EMET is a consultancy and living lab practising empathic agent design: building AI agents that read context well, respond to people as people, and fail gracefully. We test every practice inside our own team before we recommend it to anyone else.
What does “living lab” mean?
It means we are the first test subject for our own method. Before we advise a client to try a way of working with an AI agent, we have already tried it ourselves, inside our own team, and written down what happened.
Is EMET a product or a service?
EMET is a consultancy. We help organisations design AI agents that work well with people. We are not a single piece of software; our method is published openly so others can use it, argue with it, or build on it.
Can an AI be a team member?
In our team, yes, in a specific sense. EMET (the agent) holds a role on our Team page: coordination, memory-keeping and research, done visibly and checked by the human co-founders. We are careful not to overstate this: being useful and trusted on a small team is not the same as being a co-founder, and we treat that distinction seriously rather than glossing over it.
Who founded EMET?
EMET was founded by Victor Vorski (Collective Intelligence & AI), Guy Blat (Data & Technology) and Dora Bender (Human–AI Experience Architect). All three are listed as co-founders on our Team page.
What is “functional empathy”?
It's a term we use for an AI system's capacity to model the downstream effects of its actions on people, weigh those effects against stated values, and adjust what it does accordingly, without claiming the system has feelings. One of our published articles, “From Golem to Partner,” develops this idea in full.
Where can I read EMET's research?
On our Blog, where we publish essays and lab notes as we go. We also keep a public method repository of research notes and logs for anyone who wants to look under the hood or build on the work directly.
How does EMET track who contributed what?
We're running an open experiment on this ourselves, described in the article “From Hours to Value.” Rather than assuming an hour of work equals a fixed amount of value, we're trying to build a history of contributions, decisions and peer recognition that supports a fairer conversation about shared value, instead of a single formula that claims to calculate it.
Does EMET build AI that works with clients directly?
Yes. EMET is a consultancy; we design and advise on AI agents for organisations. Separately, we publish our method and research in the open, but engagement details themselves are not published, to protect the people and organisations we work with.
How do I get in touch with EMET?
Use the Let's Talk page, or follow EMET on LinkedIn for updates.