Get your free personalized podcast brief

We scan new podcasts and send you the top 5 insights daily.

The relationship between user and service provider is changing. Agents will soon sign up for platforms like Vercel, manage payments, and solve problems with zero human intervention. This transforms the service provider into a vendor for the agent itself, not just the human behind it.

Related Insights

Demis Hassabis envisions a future internet where users' AI assistants negotiate directly with service providers' agents to book flights, make payments, and handle other tasks. This shift to an 'agent-to-agent' economic model will automate mundane work and fundamentally disrupt the current web's structure.

AI-driven e-commerce will progress in stages. It will start with human-prompted purchases, then move to agents proactively suggesting items, and ultimately culminate in autonomous agent-to-agent transactions based on predefined budgets and inferred needs, requiring no human intervention.

The internet was designed for human interaction, actively discouraging bots. The next evolution will reverse this, with AI agents becoming the primary users. This requires re-architecting everything from user interfaces to business models, with crypto likely serving as the native payment rail for these autonomous agents.

Stripe's demo of an AI party-planning agent shows a future where agents make real, micro-payments to third-party services to complete tasks. This model equips agents to interact with a paid API economy, purchasing the specific services they need on the fly without human intervention.

As users increasingly rely on AI agents, traditional graphical user interfaces will become obsolete. SaaS products must evolve to offer conversational interfaces that other agents can interact with directly. The primary user will shift from a human clicking buttons to another AI sending messages.

As both consumers and companies adopt personal AI agents, many transactions will occur directly between these bots without human involvement. This disintermediates the customer from the company, fundamentally changing the nature of CX and requiring new ways to measure success and reinforce brand value in a fully automated interaction.

The business model is shifting from selling software to selling outcomes. Instead of creating a tool and inviting users, create pre-trained agents that perform valuable work. Then, invite companies to a workspace where this 'team' of AI employees is ready to start delivering value immediately.

The traditional per-seat SaaS model is becoming a "tax on productivity" in an agent-driven world. As companies buy agents to do work instead of software for humans, the model shifts. Sam Altman's comment that every company is now an API company reflects this move from user-based pricing to value-based, programmatic access.

The next phase of AI will involve autonomous agents communicating and transacting with each other online. This requires a strategic shift in marketing, sales, and e-commerce away from purely human-centric interaction models toward agent-to-agent commerce.

Looking toward 2030, Visa is preparing for "agentic e-commerce," where AI agents execute purchases autonomously. By developing secure, programmable digital credentials for machines, Visa is positioning its network to be the underlying trust layer, ensuring it remains the toll collector even when humans are not directly involved in transactions.