Agentic Flooding

I'm recently hearing the concept of "agentic flooding" being talking about. This is in the context of increased demand on public services arising from easy access to AI agents. I think it comes from here.

"Agentic Flooding" looks like a meme that will go viral and I'm a bit suspicious of it in this form. Certainly, increased demand and increased complexity of demand look likely. But as the originators of the concept and informed commentators point out, a good chunk of this demand will be legitimate. People who were unable to overcome the barriers to accessing their entitlements will now be able to do so with the help of their ostensibly tireless AI agents.

What I'm suspicious of is taking a concept that comes from seeing like a state and using it to cover both improved accessibility and lower barriers to fraudulent and malicious claims. Your agent helping you complete a legitimate claim and my swarm of agents helping me submit hundreds of illegitimate claims under false identities both appear to be subsumed under "agentic flooding".

These do not merit the same response. Mine looks like a familiar security problem – a Sybil attack – and yours looks like a familiar accessibility solution – an assistive technology.

I think it pays to be precise here (have I actually understood what a Sybil attack is? answers on a postcard), because prioritising the solution to the state's problems risks declaring victory while failing to solve for the users' problems. To repeat the Marty Cagan refrain: we want solutions users love that also work for the organisation.

I assume users love agents. People will pay (human) agents to handle their tax affairs for them rather than deal with the hassle of doing it themselves and the prior hassle of learning how to.HMRC have policy on how they work with agents and they even provide an agent API. So it seems like agents work for them.

What users don't love is not having their claims processed because the institution that needs to process them is overwhelmed. So, users and government organisations should be able to agree that malicious behaviour like my Sybil attack is unwanted.

It doesn't take a huge leap to assume that if the government gives people to identify themselves and their AI agents as their agents, then most of the legitimate demand will go through that channel and most of the illegitimate demand will try to subvert it. This gives us a natural approach to prioritisation of claims. And accessibility issues arising from penalising the illegitimate route are handled by the agents finding and navigating the legitimate route on behalf of the users.

I have a proof of concept which is currently booked that I will link later.