Founding Research Advisor — Human Coordination & AI in Banbury

Help explore one of AI's most overlooked questions. Can AI help groups reach better decisions together?

This role exists because of one question that has fundamentally changed how we think about SplitStay. Over the past year, building SplitStay has changed how I think about AI. When I started the company, I thought we were solving a problem in travel. Today, I think travel is simply where a much broader challenge becomes impossible to ignore: helping groups reach decisions.

Modern AI has become remarkably capable of helping individuals. We can search, write, analyse, translate and generate with extraordinary speed. Yet helping a group of people navigate different preferences, constraints and trade-offs remains surprisingly difficult. That feels less like a software problem and more like a human one.

I have a hypothesis. I believe recent advances in AI create an opportunity to revisit decades of research into human coordination. Not to replace human judgement. Not to automate consensus. But to build tools that help groups understand one another better, surface hidden constraints, explain trade-offs more clearly, reduce unnecessary friction, and ultimately help people reach better decisions together.

Questions like these have been explored for decades in fields such as Behavioural Science, Negotiation, Human–Computer Interaction, Collective Decision-Making, Organisational Behaviour, Computational Social Science, and Collective Intelligence. The challenge isn't that we lack research; it's that very little of it reaches the software people use every day. I'd like SplitStay to become one place where those worlds genuinely meet.

Why travel? Because it exposes coordination failures every single day. A group trip forces people to reconcile different budgets, different schedules, different priorities, and different expectations before anything can happen. Booking technology already exists. Helping the group reach the booking decision is a different challenge. That is where we're focused.

I'm intentionally looking for one long-term collaborator. Not someone to validate my thinking, but someone to challenge it. Someone who enjoys asking difficult questions and is excited by seeing rigorous research tested with real users solving real problems. Whether you're a professor, postdoctoral researcher, research fellow or practitioner matters far less than how you think.

Success isn't another startup feature or another academic publication. Success is building products that quietly embed decades of behavioural research into everyday life. If users coordinate more effectively without ever knowing why, I think that's a meaningful form of research impact.

Practical details: Long-term strategic collaboration, approximately 20 hours per month, equity through the Founder Institute FAST Agreement, remote, direct collaboration with the founder. The structure matters far less than finding the right intellectual fit.

If your work intersects with this question, I'd be delighted to exchange ideas. I'm looking for someone who enjoys questioning assumptions, as I suspect the most valuable insights will come from discovering where our current thinking is incomplete. If, while reading this, one particular researcher immediately came to mind, I'd genuinely appreciate an introduction. Some collaborations begin with funding, some begin with publications, and sometimes they begin with a single conversation. Perhaps this could be one of them.

Can AI help groups reach better decisions together? I don't know. I'd like to find out.

Ruben Vanhees
Founder, SplitStay