The Switchboard

OMXUS Research Series — this paper of 33

The kitchen-table version of (Applebee & Combe, 2026, "From Cellular to Neural")

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Your phone connects to a cell tower. The tower doesn't know what you're going to say. It doesn't care. Its job is to make sure your call gets to the right place, that the connection stays strong, and that if the tower you're near is overloaded, your call gets quietly handed off to a less busy one.

Nobody runs the whole thing from one building. There's no room somewhere with a person deciding which tower your call goes to. The towers figure it out themselves, using a system that watches the traffic, spots problems, and fixes them — automatically.

Now imagine that instead of phone calls, the traffic is AI agents talking to each other. Instead of cell towers, it's computers running those agents. Same problem. Same solution.

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What's the problem?

Right now, if you want AI agents to work together — say one that reads your email, one that manages your calendar, one that handles your finances — they all have to go through a company's cloud server. Your email agent talks to OpenAI. Your calendar agent talks to OpenAI. Your finance agent talks to OpenAI. Everything routes through one company, on their servers, on their terms, billed to your credit card.

If that company goes down, all your agents stop. If that company raises prices, you pay more. If that company decides your agents are doing something it doesn't like, it pulls the plug.

This is exactly what phone networks looked like 30 years ago. One company controlled everything. If you wanted to make a call, you used their equipment, their towers, their cables. Then the industry broke it open. They created a system called O-RAN — Open Radio Access Network — where the software that manages the towers is separate from the towers themselves, and anyone can write the management