IEEE Spectrum: “Some of the world’s largest companies with the biggest supply chains—including Walmart, the global shipping giant Maersk, and the telecom servicer Vodafone—are now using bots powered by artificial intelligence to negotiate and maintain supplier contracts. That these sophisticated AI systems were designed and built by a startup in Estonia is interesting; it’s even more notable that bots now routinely engage in automated contract negotiations for sprawling global enterprises. But what’s really eye-opening is that these AI agents aim to work autonomously. Which prompts a question: What will happen if the AIs start to haggle amongst themselves? “In the future I can imagine all sorts of agents in the real physical world negotiating with one another,” says Tim Baarslag, a senior researcher in intelligent and autonomous systems at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam. “Letting these bots run completely wild, I think, requires more research.”  Baarslag has wrestled with negotiation bot concepts for years (one of his peers has a running project called Pocket Negotiator). In 2017 he and his colleagues published “When Will Negotiation Agents Be Able to Represent Us?” They drew a sharp line between automated and autonomous negotiation. The difference is the freedom to negotiate independently. The five-year-old Estonian startup Pactum is clearly marketing its bot as an autonomous agent. In addition to Maersk and Walmart, its client list now includes a wire and cable supplier and an electrical supply wholesaler (once part of Westinghouse). The startup landed a US $20 million venture capital investment in July from backers including Maersk itself…”