TechFlow News, March 23: According to a Cointelegraph report, a16z Crypto published a post stating that “Agentic AI Commerce”—a business model powered by autonomous AI agents—could disrupt the existing internet advertising economy.
Sam Ragsdale, Co-Founder of Merit Systems and Cryptocurrency Investment Engineer at a16z, wrote in the a16z Crypto blog that from 1997 to 2024, the core of the internet business model has been “attention fragmentation”—monetizing users’ partial attention via advertisements. However, large language models (LLMs) and AI agents are not susceptible to ad-based distractions, rendering this foundational logic obsolete. Per Mordor Intelligence, the global online advertising market size is projected to reach approximately $291 billion in 2025, dominated primarily by Google.
Ragsdale noted that AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Gemini have introduced “instant checkout” features, enabling users to complete purchases directly within conversations. Yet such services remain fundamentally “walled gardens,” requiring merchants to undergo stringent vetting before integration. He argues that the true solution lies in AI agents built upon open protocols, empowering them to autonomously discover and interact with any merchant. The article cites Coinbase’s x402 protocol and the Machine Payment Protocol (MPP), jointly launched by Tempo and Stripe, as potential infrastructure for this new commerce paradigm.
