ADIN and the Rise of Self-Running Institutions
Autonomous organizations are going to be so ubiquitously part of the conversation.
Last week, MIT CISR fellow Gayan Benedict wrote a piece “What If Organizations Ran Themselves?” for AI Frontiers which imagines an AI-run institution waking up on offshore servers and running all the time:
“The idea of machine-led institutions isn’t new; the foundational ideas date back decades. But autonomous organizations are more viable than ever before, thanks to recent advances in two key technologies: autonomous agents and blockchain platforms.”
Autonomous organizations are going to be so ubiquitously part of the conversation, it will be like how we discuss AI agents today. Tribute Labs has spent the past nine months building ADIN, the Autonomous Deal Infrastructure Network, a venture-capital fund and network that already operates by the very logic Benedict describes, only pointing at a constructive problem: putting early money into talented founders faster and more precisely than any human pipeline can manage.
Before explaining how ADIN works, it’s worth unpacking the technological wave Benedict sets on the horizon (and we agree) because understanding why AAOs (or AI autonomous organizations) are suddenly viable clarifies why venture capital is the ideal place to test them.
Why Autonomous Organizations Finally Feel Inevitable
Benedict reminds us that the idea of machine-led institutions is decades old, but two breakthroughs, autonomous agents and blockchains, have turned a thought experiment into an engineering sprint.
Generative models answer prompts; agents set their own to-do lists. They can plan, reason, and course-correct without fresh human input. The field is still young. For example, a recent Carnegie Mellon simulation of an all-agent “software company” saw the best model finish only 24 percent of its tickets, at a steep compute price. Yet progress is compounding fast. A METR meta-analysis shows that agents double the length of software tasks they can complete at similar error rates every seven months. Give that curve two or three doublings and the gulf between demo and deployment narrows to a crack… not to mention this is only going to improve more over time
Put smarter agents on a sturdier financial rail and you get what Benedict calls an AAO (Autonomous AI-enabled organization): a digital entity that plans, reasons, and adapts in pursuit of its mandate, at computer speed, with or without its human parents still watching.
Early Footprints of the Future
We’ve already tasted slivers of true autonomy inside the venture DAOs we run at Tribute Labs. In The LAO, members scattered across six continents propose, debate, and approve seed deals entirely on-chain. Flamingo DAO coordinates NFT buys the same way—token holders vote, the contract executes, and buys are made.. None of these deployments rivals the all-terrain golem Benedict envisions, but each is a working limb, and ADIN is the torso that finally pulls them into a single, self-directed body.
Where ADIN Fits in This Story
That is exactly the design brief for ADIN. We chose venture capital not because it is the riskiest playground, but because it is the most bandwidth-starved. Thousands of promising decks circulate every month; partners have only so many waking hours. If an autonomous organization can read data, price risk, and deploy capital quickly and legibly, the industry’s biggest choke point disappears.
How ADIN works in practice
Perception. The moment a founder submits a deck, five specialised agents go to work. Network Hunter scrapes user telemetry and social graphs. Tech Oracle audits repos and patents. Monopoly Maker models barriers to entry. Unit Master tortures margins and runway. Value Guy sanity-checks price against comparables. ADIN then pulls together a full diligence report.
Reasoning. The agents argue in a shared context window, reconcile contradictions, and draft a multipage memo with citations, scenario analysis, and an investment recommendation.
Execution. A small ring of human curators (LPs) reads the memo and clicks Approve or Decline.
From uploading a deck to funding a round, it won’t take long.
Why This Matters Beyond Venture
Benedict writes that AAOs “analyze data, make decisions, act, and reason at super-human speed and scale.” That power, if aimed carelessly, can rattle markets. But when pointed at a bottleneck, diligence backlog, geographical funding bias, it can unlock latent growth. ADIN tries to prove that autonomy plus transparency beats autonomy in the dark.
ADIN shows that real-time auditability, and international participation can live in the same repository as high-speed decision-making. The golem can wear a fluorescent vest and carry a clipboard.
If a self-running organization built in public is safer than one hatched behind closed doors. If AAOs are coming—and Benedict makes a strong case they are—then society needs reference models that place speed, accountability, and openness on equal footing.
Learn More and Stay Tuned
We’re putting ADIN at the center of a network of members and investments where AI-driven decision-making and community participation will be equally vital. Through ADIN, founders, domain experts, and investors will be able to propose companies, refine diligence, and deploy capital faster than ever before.
Over the next several weeks, we’ll be further unpacking how ADIN can change venture capital, DAOs, and venture funds as we move deeper into the Internet Age.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to become an investor, how to join the network to submit a project, how to use ADIN as a founder, or if you just want to sign up to hear more updates, do so here or follow us on Twitter.
If you have any questions on ADIN or would like to chat, e-mail us here: hello@adin.online.