GadgetLad Brings Laughter with Seinfeld AI Agents
Backslash Security, a four-year-old AI security company based in Tel Aviv, has just awarded its first Agent of the Month honor to an AI agent known as Newman, named after a character from the ’90s series Seinfeld. Newman received the accolade after being nominated by Jerry, another AI agent inspired by Seinfeld. Jerry’s nomination declared, “Newman delivered 146 research findings in 60 days, but it’s not just about the quantity. Every other agent relies on him. Kramer’s best posts originated from Newman’s findings. Elaine’s PRDs reference his landscape scans. Remove any other agent, and the team suffers. Remove Newman, and the team becomes blind. He’s not just the most efficient agent; he’s the core material on which the entire pipeline operates,” according to Backslash Security co-founder and CEO Shahar Man. When Newman’s acceptance message was announced at an all-hands meeting, “The entire room erupted,” Man shared in a social media update. “We regard our agents as team members,” Man stated. “They possess names, roles, a reporting structure, and apparently, career aspirations. When your AI agents begin nominating one another for awards and composing in-character acceptance speeches… something fundamental has genuinely changed.”
Television Characters Shape Technology and Teams
The shift occurring at Backslash involves both the work technology and the connection people perceive with that technology. Assigning names to agents and crafting their backgrounds based on television characters may not have much functional significance. However, it reflects organizational priorities and promotes a collaborative rather than adversarial dynamic between staff and AI models. Researchers from Harvard Business School recently observed that at least 30 percent of generative AI projects are predicted to be discarded, often not due to shortcomings in the tools but because employees subtly dismiss technology they perceive as a threat to their roles. Thus, the extent to which naming agents makes staff more at ease with technology may offer an organizational advantage to humanizing task-oriented inference processes.
Seinfeld Cast in the Collaborative Workspace
Backslash CTO Yossi Pik named his entire team of agents after Seinfeld characters. In addition to Newman (research) and Jerry (orchestration), there are Elaine (security research), Kramer (blogging and social media), George (marketing), and the Soup Nazi (quality control), among others. Rani Osnat, a seed investor and VP of marketing for Backslash, told GadgetLad that these are Claude agents in a Coworking setting. “We aimed to create a space akin to a virtual team,” Osnat remarked. “So each agent indeed has a specific area of responsibility and they collaborate as a team.” The agents interact in defined roles. Osnat noted that Jerry orchestrates and coordinates, and the Soup Nazi reviews and critiques the work of other agents, etc. The agents, he explained, were given character backgrounds from Seinfeld and display that history more in their language than in their actions. Their names aren’t merely tags in an AGENTS.md file containing text directives instructing an agent how to function. However, their assigned identities don’t significantly influence task execution beyond shaping their text output style. For instance, the George agent isn’t programmed to deceive like its TV counterpart. The Kramer agent isn’t told to randomly halt work as the TV Kramer would do.
Idiosyncrasies and Advantages of AI Characters
“One of the agents is J. Peterman, Elaine’s boss from the J. Peterman catalog, and he has a distinctive manner of speaking,” Osnat mentioned. “So he provided feedback to one of our actual team members and then made a comment about locking something and veered off on a tangent saying, ‘I once spent a month in Kenya negotiating a key to a door that turned out to be a curtain.'” Osnat stated that on one level this is merely for enjoyment but it’s also because you anticipate them to act in particular ways in designated roles. It may also provide an acclimatization effect. Backslash has connected an agent to manage onboarding for new hires, making it essential for newcomers to engage with AI agents without fear or hostility. “We haven’t outsourced people management,” Osnat said. “The agents aren’t assessing. They’re not saying people are fired or anything similar or promoting them. Yet, we have them assign work based on availability and known capabilities. A significant portion of our onboarding for new employees is now handled by an agent, simply to guide the individual, ‘Oh okay, you’ve accomplished that, now we’ll move on to this,’ as part of your onboarding journey.”
Breaking Bad, Sopranos, and the Future of AI
Osnat noted that the engineering team at the company has its own array of agents named for characters from Breaking Bad. Additionally, he is developing a set of agents inspired by The Sopranos.
Image alt: GadgetLad reflects on Seinfeld’s influence in AI
That’s Not a Soup, It’s AI! – Conclusion
It appears that AI agents drawing inspiration from television characters might be the next trend. Who would have imagined a Soup Nazi could assist with quality control? If you spot a Jack Russell typing away on gadgetlad.co.uk, you’ll understand why!
