agent economy

advancedoutlook

An economy where AI agents work autonomously on behalf of people and companies, searching, negotiating, ordering, and paying, often trading with each other.

In plain terms

Imagine everyone having a tireless representative who handles purchasing, appointment booking, and quote requests on their behalf. The agent economy is a world where these representatives are software, negotiating not only with humans but also with each other.

Today you open the online store, you compare prices, and you click to pay. In the agent economy, you only state the goal ("I need a washing machine under 150,000 Hungarian forints by Friday"), your agent does the rest, and on the store's side, another agent likely responds to it.

This is more than a smarter chatbot. Here, the software behaves as an economic actor: it buys and sells services, drafts contracts, and moves money. This is why new rules are needed on who is responsible for it and how we know in whose name it acts.

How it works

You give an instruction: you tell the agent the goal, the budget limit, and the boundaries, for example how much it can spend without your approval.
The agent looks around: it queries the offerings of shops, service providers, and other agents. Today it often browses the same websites you would use, but increasingly asks via standardized, machine-readable channels.
It coordinates and negotiates: requests quotes, compares them, and, if needed, delegates subtasks to other specialized agents.
It verifies itself and pays: it digitally proves it is acting with your authorization, then pays for the purchase within the specified limit.
It accounts for what it handled and at what cost, and you can verify, revoke, or tighten its rules.

An everyday example

You ask your AI assistant to organize a long weekend in Vienna for 120,000 forints. It negotiates with hotel and railway agents about price and timing, then books and pays for everything with a single approval from you. You never opened a single booking site.

Who is affected

entrepreneur, executiveIf agents choose instead of customers, your offer must be readable and comparable for machines, otherwise you will not even make it to the candidate pool.

marketerMood-driven advertising has less effect on an agent that decides based on data, price, and reliability. → Marketing

bank customer, investorYour agent spends your money, so it is important to know what budget you assign to it and who is liable for a faulty transaction. → Money

lawyer, citizenIt is unclear who is responsible if an agent signs a bad contract or exceeds its authorization. → Law

A common misconception

MythIn the agent economy, machines earn money for themselves, while humans are excluded from the economy.

In realityToday, an agent acts on behalf of someone and with their money. Legally, it is not an independent actor, so the benefit and responsibility remain with the person or the company. What changes is who performs the search, the deal, and the administration.

Limits and risks

This is still more of a vision than everyday reality: in most purchases and contracts, a human still approves the final step.
An agent can err and be deceived: a cleverly written hidden instruction can induce an agent to buy the wrong product or disclose data.
Responsibility and consumer protection rules are not keeping pace with the technology; in case of a dispute, it may be difficult to determine who made the error.
If a few large companies' agents and payment channels dominate the market, they can decide which seller's offer even reaches you.

Similar, but not the same

platform economy – There, an app connects people (for example, a driver and a passenger); here, software negotiates and does business instead of the parties.
automation – Traditional automation executes pre-defined steps, whereas in the agent economy, software weighs options, makes choices, and concludes deals within the given framework.
agent-based commerce – This is only about purchasing; the agent economy is broader: it also includes work, services, and transactions between companies.

Related concepts

Broader

digital economy, artificial intelligence, automation

Narrower

agent-based commerce, payment between agents, agent marketplace

On the edge

AI-agent, multi-agent system, inter-agent communication, MCP, digital workforce

A brief history

The idea grows out of decades of research into multi-agent systems, but the term entered public awareness with the emergence of agents built on large language models in 2024–2025. In 2025, the first open standards appeared for agent-to-agent communication (such as Google's A2A protocol) and for payments initiated by agents (such as Google's AP2 protocol and the Agentic Commerce Protocol by OpenAI and Stripe). In the same year, Google DeepMind researchers published a study titled "Virtual Agent Economies" on the topic.

Where things stand

The building blocks – communication and payment standards between agents, the first agent-based purchasing solutions – already exist and are spreading, but we cannot yet speak of a fully autonomous agent economy. Most transactions today still require human approval.

Status: 2026 November

In the news

Appears in 1 Agent Age stories; the curve shows weekly occurrence in the news magazine.

Visa: issuer readiness goes live, but the agent economy lacks infrastructureAug 17, 2026 · Money

Also known as

agent economy · agent economy · agent economy · agentic economy · AI agent economy · agent economy · agent-based economy · agent-to-agent economy

Sources

Tomašev et al.: Virtual Agent Economies (Google DeepMind, arXiv, 2025)

This entry was machine-edited and has undergone machine expert review; the “In the news” section updates automatically from Agent Age stories.