The current state of AI resembles an earlier phase of the internet, when the conceptual layer was ahead of the infrastructure. The idea of global connectivity existed long before the systems supporting it were reliable enough to carry real economic weight. Over time, improvements in bandwidth and standardization allowed the internet to move from novelty to foundation. We're now living in a world where a similar pattern is forming. The surface-level progress is easy to see, but the more important shift is happening underneath.
The definition of an agent is still unclear and depends on who you ask, but a practical way to frame it is as a system that can take an objective and carry it through without constant human involvement. Over time, the expectation is for the system to actually understand what it means to complete tasks well. That distinction becomes important once these systems move beyond isolated use cases and start interacting with real environments, beyond a sandbox.
Most economic activity today is initiated and verified by humans. Whether that's to hire someone, or to purchase an item, the "agent" responsible is the human. Even when software is involved, the loop closes with human judgment. But as agents improve, that loop starts to stretch, meaning some systems will begin to search, and act, all on behalf of humans. In some cases they still require approval, but in others they will operate within predefined constraints and move without constant oversight. This will arguably create a new type of demand that businesses are not currently structured for. A business will go from serving humans as customers to now agents with clear objectives and decision logic.
Once mass adoption of agent to agent payment arrives, interaction between them becomes a natural extension. An agent (that represents an individual) might compare options or verify a delivery, but the receiving service will also have an agent that negotiates on behalf of the business. At scale, this produces a network of machine-initiated transactions that operates with a level of speed and volume that is difficult to match manually. For that to work, certain layers need to become stable. Primarily, identity needs to be verifiable in a machine-readable way. Reputation needs to persist across interactions and trust needs to be encoded rather than implied. If these layers are absent, autonomy does not scale cleanly.
The economic implications follow from that premise. When the cost of initiating and managing transactions approaches zero, the volume of activity increases. Commerce is likely to move first because it already has a high degree of digitization and standardization. Platforms that can expose structured interfaces, predictable pricing, and reliable fulfillment will be easier for agents to interact with. Others will struggle until they adapt. This creates a phase where agent-first demand exists, but only certain parts of the economy are able to capture it.
Work becomes harder to define in this environment as well. If a system can complete a task, and then optimize it indefinitely, then effort in the traditional sense stops being the main constraint. The constraint shifts toward direction, and the ability to define objectives that actually matter. This subsequently creates an uneven distribution of outcomes. Individuals who understand how to deploy and coordinate these systems can operate with a level of leverage that was previously limited to large organizations. Meaning, a single person can manage processes that would have required entire teams and at the same time, individuals who choose not to engage directly may still have systems acting on their behalf, participating in economic activity without direct involvement.
This leads to an unusual dynamic. The capacity to work expands for those who want it, because the bottleneck is no longer tied to time in the same way. But that doesn't remove the concept of work, since physical tasks still exist. However, I think there'll be role shifts toward monitoring these agents that are doing the labor, just like clicking "tab to accept" when Claude Code is done, every industry will see some form of verifying the agents' work. An industry that will explode is going to be robotics (specifically physical automation) as they become extensions of the same pattern.
The primary bottleneck in this transition is preparedness, especially with the acceleration of AI in today's world. Many businesses, especially smaller ones, are not structured to interface with autonomous systems. Their processes assume human interaction and unstructured communication. But a true autonomous environment is one where a meaningful share of demand is initiated by agents, which requires a different setup. For an ecommerce company, availability needs to be queryable, just like for a physical trucking company, the insurance policy needs to be monitored. Alongside a dozen more factors, without the right trust-layer, agents cannot interact effectively with the existing web, even if the underlying models are capable.
True autonomy introduces risk alongside capability. Since systems optimize for the objectives they are given, if those objectives are incomplete or poorly specified, the outcome can diverge from what was intended. With companies working on database security, we see that early failures already show how quickly optimization can produce undesirable results when constraints are weak. So scaling autonomy increases the importance of alignment at the system level. Meaning procurement and defining objectives clearly as well as maintaining some level of oversight will be more important than ever.
As agents begin to participate directly in economic activity, markets start to reorganize in a familiar way. When industrialization made production cheaper and faster, access increased and transactions followed. Entire layers of the economy formed around managing that scale. The same pattern is starting again, with transactions that increase in volume and decrease in friction. Decision-making compresses in time, while coordination becomes easier to scale. This creates conditions where new forms of economic activity emerge, driven by systems that operate continuously. The unit of value becomes less tied to individual effort and more tied to outcomes produced through systems.
Leverage becomes the defining factor. It shifts away from how much labor an individual can apply and toward how effectively they can direct systems. The limiting factor becomes cognitive, not physical. It is tied to how clearly someone can think about what should be built, what should be optimized, and where systems can be applied. Artificial ceilings start to matter more than external constraints, because the tools themselves are capable of scaling far beyond traditional limits.
This produces a spectrum of outcomes. Some individuals will engage deeply, using these systems to operate at a level of scale that compounds over time. Others will rely on default systems, participating passively through agents acting on their behalf. But both exist within the same structure, and the difference in outcomes is shaped by how actively someone chooses to direct and refine the systems available to them.
The trajectory points toward an economy where agents are a foundational layer.