Rise of the Intention Economy: AI and the Trillion Dollar Battle to Get Inside Your Head

This talk identifies and names a new economic model emerging from unprecedented investment in generative and agentic AI – one focused not on capturing attention, but on predicting and shaping human intention.

Drawing on more than a decade of original research undertaken in collaboration with Dr Yaqub Chaudhary, I show how AI systems are already being used to forecast and intervene in 'intelligent' decision-making processess across work, politics, markets and everyday life, with far-reaching consequences for democracy and the institutions behind shared reality.

Speaker list

Prof. Jonnie Penn

Cambridge University

Assistant Professor