Paper One
The Agentic Economy
AI is moving from knowing, to acting, to transacting. Why blockchain rails become the settlement layer for software that buys and sells on our behalf.
The Agentic Economy series
A series of papers on how autonomous AI agents will transact, and the infrastructure that makes it safe for them to do so.
The papers
All on Medium
Read on Medium
Paper Two
The Trust Stack
How an agent proves who it is, what it is allowed to do and who it answers to, and why that trust has to be verifiable before markets can rely on it.
Paper Three
Machine Markets
Agents will trade at machine speed. What happens when they make mistakes, how undo windows and insurance can be built into the rails, and who ends up with the value.
Paper Four
The Quantum Deadline
Why the cryptography that protects digital assets has to change, and why starting early is a management task rather than a panic.
Paper Five
Governing the Machine Economy
Liability, agent identity standards, programmable compliance and the jurisdictional race: what proportionate regulation of autonomous economic actors looks like, and who wins by writing it first.
Paper Six
The Firm, Redrawn
What continuous, market-priced capability acquisition does to organisational boundaries, procurement and the shape of the enterprise.
Each paper is free to read on Medium. Between papers I publish a weekly post on the agentic economy.
The framework
Three eras of AI
AI 1.0
Think
Models that know things and answer questions.
AI 2.0
Think and act
Assistants that use tools and carry out tasks on our behalf.
AI 3.0
Think, act and transact
Agents that hold identity, spend money and settle with one another. This is the agentic economy.
The questions behind the series
Once machines become economic participants, hard questions arrive quickly. Each paper takes on one of them.
- How does an agent prove who it is?
- What is it authorised to do?
- Who owns what?
- How does it transfer value?
- How do we keep an immutable record of what happened?
- How do millions of autonomous systems transact with one another?
Follow my thinking
New papers and weekly posts on the agentic economy, by email. You can leave at any time.