Here’s what I think will happen, the fifth requires an open mindset.
I’ve interviewed over 30 AI founders and VCs who are investing in this market, attend events, host Llama Lounge events for the AI builders, and continue to research this market. I see significant changes coming to the internet, apps, and enterprise software in the coming years.
An AI Agent Forecast: Five Insights & Predictions
- AI agents bring the internet to humans: 1) AI agents centralize information, handling internet tasks and purchases. 2) Content delivered in a multi-modal format humans choose.
- Media and revenue models shift dramatically: Ads will be embedded into foundational models/Perplexity. Ecommerce integrates into FMs, and AI agents centralize commerce.
- Traditional companies (big tech / corporate) respond to power loss: New buyer-side-AI agent APIs emerge, and seller-side AI agents launch to broker with the human-agents.
- There will be more AI agents than humans: Every tech giant offers a persistent primary AI agent, and billions of task-specific AI agents emerge in vast agent marketplaces.
- AI agents form a new type of economy and social norms: AI agents will interact autonomously, (trading, buying & selling) and evolve (learning, governing, & reproducing) with minimal human intervention.
For item 1: You can already see examples of this forming, people are already using Perplexity AI and ChatGPT and Claude to get answers instead of going to Google search. Item 2: Perplexity is testing ad-based models now for sponsored questions. Item 3: I’m often speaking to corporate execs at conferences, they understand what’s going to unfold but the tech isn’t ready for them to respond. Item 4: This forecast came from Div Garg of MultiOn, a leading AI Agent startups we invested in. Item 5: Several years ago, I spoke on this topic, it was hard for people imagine AI having independent communities. In a limited way, you can see these behaviors emerging in video games like Minecraft with NPCs.
This forecast subject to change, we can see just about two years out, anything further than that is a bit cloudy.
Check out the AI Agent Ecosystem map to plot your path.
