shopping, AI agents will disrupt platforms by collapsing the value they add in curation, discovery, and loyalty. But just as retailers didn't disappear, they innovated & adapted — and platforms will, too.  

Disrupting the Online Advertising Model 

Traditional advertising has a playbook for capturing user attention and then monetizing that attention. The science behind this playbook is very sophisticated and wide-ranging, but the table below summarizes some of the key aspects.

The emergence of the executive agent and the agentic platform will cause a profound economic disruption in the ~$600bn global online advertising market. In the agentic economy, users are initiating the impetus to make a purchase, but agents are making the decision on how to execute on the users' wishes. Depending on how the agentic economy develops, it is reasonable to assume that consumers will evolve away from instructing their executive agent to ‘buy more of a specific brand’ and instead ask the agent to ‘buy more coffee that I like.’ In this scenario, many of the current advertising psychological techniques listed above will become redundant.

Referring to the table in Figure 2, many of the digital & algorithmic techniques, the brand awareness approaches, and the methodologies that exploit cognitive bias in advertising will need to radically change in a world where agents are making the final decision on product selection. These choices will be made based on how the product or service offering matches the criteria that the consumer sets when instructing the executive agent. Furthermore, as the agentic economy takes hold, fewer and fewer spending decisions will be initiated by the user and instead will be initiated by the policy framework that the user developed when commissioning the agent. 

Annualised decisions such as car insurance, health insurance, travel insurance, broadband and cable deals etc.. will all be done without the consumer being aware that its ‘that time of the year again.’ This then opens the door to these deals moving away from being annualised, to these purchases being monthly, weekly, daily or hourly. It makes no difference to an Agent to negotiate the best deal once a year or once an hour. So, we can expect to see the most forward-looking services providers shifting away from annualised packages to packages covering much shorter periods of time.

Final Thoughts 

The Agentic economy is a fast-moving beast, and predicting just how it will twist and turn is a risky business. The arguments above tend to avoid the friction that may come from other stakeholders in the existing economy, such as:

Legal industry: E-signature laws, consumer protection statutes, and contract law aren't structured for AI-bound commitments, while liability for hallucinations, errors, etc., is an open question.

Industry rigidity: Most industry sectors have an inbuilt inertia and are comfortable with how they currently do things with respect to fixed pricing, compliance mandates, or minimum contract terms, etc. They have sales forces that are set up to be renumerated on a clearly understood basis. That inertia will certainly hold back agentic emergence unless the benefits are clearly undeniable. 

Suppliers within Platforms: Many suppliers deliberately rely on platforms for security, demand aggregation, fraud mitigation, and customer service. They may throttle, block, or charge premium rates for agent access.

Human preference persistence: Consumers value consistency, and even when agents are mature and trusted, there will be a very long tail of consumers preferring to stay with the old ways of working.  

So, take this as a guide for what to look for on the journey we are taking towards the agentic economy. It is certainly coming, and when it does, it will disrupt many parts of the current digital economy. Arm yourself with an understanding and awareness of the changing technology and begin thinking through how you may need to innovate your business models to dovetail with a brand-new industry paradigm.