In April 2025 I was invited to Coachella to help NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory do something unusual: run a live discussion about the Universe in which two of the participants were not human.
The session was Ask an Astronomer, with JPL’s exoplanet and Earth scientists taking questions from a festival audience. Propelity built the AI agents that joined them on stage.
Two agents: Earth, and an Alien
Rather than a single assistant answering factual questions, we built two characters with genuinely different points of view.
- Earth: answering as the planet itself. A perspective with four and a half billion years of context and a stake in the outcome.
- The Alien: answering as an outside observer, with no particular loyalty to how humans frame things.
Audience questions went to the scientists and to the agents, and the interesting moments were where they diverged. A question about climate or habitability reads very differently depending on whether the answer comes from a researcher, from the planet, or from something looking in from outside.
Why the framing mattered
The audience was Gen Z and Millennials at a music festival, not a lecture hall, and not a group with any obligation to keep listening. A conventional Q&A competes with everything else happening at Coachella. Giving the science two characters to argue through turned an information session into something worth standing still for.
That is the part that transfers to ordinary business work. Most organisations deploying AI reach for a neutral assistant that answers questions correctly and is instantly forgettable. Deciding who the agent is (what it knows, what it cares about, what it will push back on) is usually what determines whether anyone actually uses it.
Building agents with a point of view
Propelity builds conversational AI for businesses that want something more than a chatbot: voice assistants that qualify inbound calls, operational tools that sit above existing systems, and agents designed around a specific role rather than a generic one.