Avatar Intelligence: Amplifying Human Agency Through Persistent Personal Agents

Zheng Wu, Xinbei Ma, Yao Yao, Zhaoyuan Huang, Haowen Hu +6

Personal AI agents are increasingly capable of handling long-horizon tasks across applications, yet users often need to invest substantial effort in specifying goals, resolving ambiguity, and verifying outcomes. We argue that progress should be measured by how effectively agents amplify human agency: enabling people to pursue their goals with less routine supervision while retaining control over consequential decisions. We advocate Avatar Intelligence, a paradigm of persistent personal agents that represent users' goals, values, and constraints through sustained decision delegation across contexts and time. We describe a maturity roadmap from human-directed execution to autonomous operation within delegated domains, and introduce the Agentic Oversight Index (AOI) as a framework for evaluating delivered value against agent-side operational cost and human oversight burden. We identify three core research challenges: identity-continuous personalization that carries user preferences across tasks, user-situated evolution through Rehearsal Engineering, and safety mechanisms that combine technical control with accountability and recourse. These directions define a research agenda for…