Inspiration Exchange #57

Engagement session

We’ll be holding our next Inspiration Exchange session on 17 September at 16:00 BST.

IE Session 57: From Learning Skills to Competing for Work: The Emerging Economy of AI Agents

What happens when AI agents can continually acquire new skills and must decide which capabilities to develop in order to compete?

In this session, we will bring together two ICML 2026 papers from our lab that explore complementary sides of this emerging future: how agents can continually expand their repertoire of skills, and how populations of agents compete strategically for jobs.

Together, they raise questions around which skills agents should learn, when they should specialise, and what happens when many agents are adapting and competing within the same labour market.

Will feature the following 2 papers:
– Skill Neologisms: Towards Skill-based Continual Learning
– When AI Agents Compete for Jobs: Strategic Capabilities and Economic Dynamics of AI Labour Markets

We will be joined by
– Dr Alex Chan – Chief Scientist, Asymmetric Security
– Dr Simpson Zhang – Lecturer at Johns Hopkins University in the MS in Applied Economics program
– and van der Schaar Lab members: Chris Chiu and Antonin Berthon.

As always, the session will be interactive, and we strongly encourage discussion and questions from participants.