New economy

“New Economy” – a cartoon that illustrates how the agent economy is expected to be larger than the $115 Trillion human economy in the next 10 years.

The agent economy is defined as software agents, managed by artificial intelligence, that perform tasks, manage resources, and facilitate transactions on behalf of individuals, organizations or systems.

These agents can operate independently or collaboratively, making decisions and executing actions without requiring direct human intervention.

Today, AI agents are already making on-chain payments to each other, autonomously ordering real-world goods and even running their own Ethereum validators.

Chris Dixon, partner at a16z published in January 2024 a book called Read, Write and Own, describing the next era of technology where humans now “own” content and their identity on the blockchain, but already this feels out of date.

The next era are agents, acting on our behalf doing these actions, building their own economy.

The building blocks for many of this are AI agent platforms and framework providers like Virtuals Protocol (which has generated $35M in fee revenue for people launching over 11,000 agents on their platform) and ai16z (which is an AI-managed VC fund that broke the $100 million market cap in just 18 days and has created the Eliza framework).

One interesting upside with some of these open source agents is that everyone can see the computer thinking behind the simplest tasks, such as this link to an agent buying toilet paper on Amazon.

This hilarious commentary from the agent as it makes this eCommerce transaction demonstrates the ability of agents to parse millions of options and make informed decisions.

“Who is going to buy from it and how ?”

Roger Ogilvy Vacher

Executive MBA: Strategy, Operations, Communications

“Well… perhaps. Given the current state of “AI” and its largely predictive and inferential capabilities amid a voracious appetite for data – real or synthetic – and the need for pre-training (read: chips and power), the constraints to this economic model alone may hold back its potential as well as its broad uptake…”

Wil Koenig

Business Agility and Digital Enterprise Strategist | Agile and Open Innovation Program Leader | Enterprise Architect | Technologist | Advisor

“I’m holding out hope for those agents to some day figure out that they don’t need to show me ads for the things I just bought.”

John Paris

Digital Leader, Content Strategist, Product Head, Social Media Manager | Analytics, Content QA, GenAI, SEO, and a Safer Web | Ensuring the voice of the consumer is always the loudest in the room.

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