By: Martin Creaner

The Agentic Economy is the emerging economic paradigm in which autonomous AI agents - capable of perceiving, reasoning, and acting - participate directly in markets as independent economic actors. Unlike traditional automation that merely executes pre-programmed tasks, these agents make decisions based on goals, real-time data, and learned behaviors. They can engage in activities such as price negotiation, supply chain coordination, and creative production. They can represent individual consumers, businesses, or themselves, interacting with other agents or humans to buy, sell, collaborate, and innovate. The Agentic Economy is being powered by advances in large language models, reinforcement learning, and decentralized infrastructure, and it blurs the lines between human and machine agency.

In a practical sense, agents will be capable of doing ‘things’ on behalf of consumers – without direct engagement by the user. For example, an agent may be given the task of finding the best travel deal or the best health insurance contract for its customer, and it will employ all the power of GenAI to do this, monitoring what is available in the market. But unlike the search engines of the past two decades, these agents will be empowered to go further on behalf of the customer. They will be able to make decisions, negotiate with other systems, get the customer the best possible deal, and then close that deal. These agents will be empowered by the customer to sign contracts on their behalf, make payments, and essentially act as if they are the customer. Give them a task, and they’ll figure out how to get it done. Not only that, but they will be working actively on that task 24/7, limiting the lock-in duration of a signed contract to an absolute minimum so that they can keep looking for better and better deals.  In the Agentic economy, instead of having a health insurance contract for a year, it might be renegotiated by your agent on a weekly or daily basis.  

To some, this is the exciting vista of the real potential of AI to change lives, while to others it’s the scary prospect of a dystopian world. But like them or not, the very first implementations of Agents are already here, and they’re not going away. Agents are already being built using the latest large language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and others, using technologies such as MCP & A2A, and powered by orchestration frameworks such as LangChain and CrewAI. The hyperscalers in all parts of the world, from Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Alibaba, are already investing heavily here as they see this as fundamentally disruptive, changing how we use the internet and who reaps the profits from it.

The shift to the Agentic Economy promises greater efficiency, personalization, and scalability, and will be hugely disruptive to existing digital economy business models.  It seems clear, from even a cursory glance at the dynamics of the Agentic economy, that the disruption to innovation in all parts of the value chain will be substantial.  Of course, technology innovation is driving the emergence of Agentics, but business model innovation & adaptation will need to be just as fundamental as the models that have driven the current digital economy (digital advertising, platforms, etc) are likely to be utterly disrupted.  

How Agentics disrupts current business models 

Some of the business models that have defined the digital economy over the past fifteen years are platform business models, search-based advertising, and the wider app economy. As I mentioned earlier, in the Agentics economy, the consumer (or enterprise) simply instructs their agent to “book me a trip to Kyoto next month.” It knows your schedule, it knows what you are interested in, and it understands your budget. It asks you a quick series of questions for clarification and then starts looking at options. It looks up flights, picks hotels, car hire, experiences, etc, that it knows you’d like. And then books the lot. No requirement for app download, no opportunity for attractive digital adverts to be presented to you! And no engagement with travel platforms, hotel booking platforms, or car hire platforms. Just done! And possibly at a lower price, as by avoiding booking aggregation platforms and going straight to the airline, car hire, or hotel website, your agent also avoids the additional ‘transactional taxes’ charged by those platforms.