Axios C-Suite: The AI agent economy unfolds
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We're getting a live look into the post-app, post-web world, for us as consumers and as business leaders.
- Meta's new personal agent, Muse — the #1 free app on Apple's App Store in the U.S. — and Microsoft's new Copilot for Business are built on the same premise about where this is headed.
Why it matters: We won't use apps (life) or software (work) to get things done. We'll tell AI agents, each running on its own cloud computer, and they'll do it for us. This is happening now.
- Ben Thompson, whose Stratechery is essential reading for tech thinkers, lays it out in his latest essay, "Apps, Agents, and Aggregation." He can be dense and deep in the weeds. Read him anyway.
1. You (Muse): You text your agent, and it gets the job done. Once you grant permission, it plugs into your email, calendar, payments and shopping, doing the clicking and scheduling you'd otherwise do with apps and websites.
- That's why Amazon blocked Muse, Thompson explains: An agent shopping for you never sees or clicks on Amazon's ads.
- Instinct, an invite-only Muse competitor lighting up Silicon Valley, just raised $1B at a $10B valuation — 4x its value ONE MONTH earlier.
2. Your business (Copilot, OpenAI's dots, Muse for Small Business): Same idea, but built for the enterprise. The competition in this space is intense. Microsoft's new Autopilot works overnight, monitors Teams channels and handles follow-ups. You tag it like a colleague, and any employee can build and share an internal app or solution on the spot. Both Meta (Muse for Small Business) and OpenAI (dots) rolled out their versions this week. Anthropic's entire business is built around business.
- Thompson's bet: No human will touch clunky enterprise software again. Why would you, when an agent can customize what you need cheaply and instantly?
Why it's sticky: Once you pour your life, or your company, into an agent, switching is brutal, Thompson argues in "Frontier Overhangs." Most people and companies will have just one. The winners will be the ones with distribution: Meta reaches nearly everyone, and Microsoft reaches nearly every worker.
- Reality check: Trust is the hurdle. Just 8% of Americans say they'd trust Meta with their passwords, and 58% wouldn't share them with any AI agent, per an Oppenheimer survey.
What this means for CEOs: We need to simultaneously retool (or prepare to, at least) our org structures to exploit new capabilities and rethink our customer relationships (and monetization) in an agent-to-agent world.
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