The end of ads? AI agents are about to change how we buy

**Sam Ragsdale** (0:00)
Anything that a human can do with a computer, an agent can also do with a computer.

**Eddy Lazzarin** (0:03)
We can now automate the commerce process. These things that I had to have a human being type a bunch of stuff or at least speak it, now that part can be automated. That's incredible. Long-term, there's really mind-melting questions like, what is an app if your agent can grab everything behind the hood that your app used to grab for you? Do you need to use the Amazon app? Maybe the Amazon app sucks compared to just asking your agent to do all the homework, read all the reviews, show me the pictures I care about. You know what I like. Isn't that better?

**Robert Hackett** (0:40)
All right, hey everybody, I'm here with Eddy Lazzarin, CTO of a16z crypto, Noah Levine, investment partner here at a16z crypto, and Sam Ragsdale, former a16z crypto teammate, and current founder of the startup Merit Systems, who's working on a project called Agent Cash that we're gonna dig into a little bit. But before we get into that, I wanna set the context here. All this stuff that's going on with agents right now is very hard to keep track of if you're not paying extremely close attention to it all the time 24 seven. In fact, like I've heard somebody describe it that you basically need to be unemployed to stay on top of everything that's happening because the pace is wildly fast and only accelerating. So what should we know about the state of the world today?
Where are we? What's happened? Sam, do you wanna kick us off since you are building and in the thick of it?

**Sam Ragsdale** (1:33)
There's taxonomy I like to start with that I stole from Eric Repple that was one of the creators of X402 at Coinbase and now helps run the X402 foundation by the Linux foundation.
The taxonomy splits it into one conversational commerce. This is checkout in Chad GPT. This is like, you go on to Chad GPT and you say like, I'm a male that lives in the West Village and I go to Equinox and I want new shoes to fit in with my peers. And then it's very empathetic and it comes up with a great Nike result and then you buy it. And then there's sort of this other thing which is delegating money to an agent to spend on your behalf to do some work.
I think the conversational commerce thing is definitely happening. There will be checkout in Jadgbt, checkout in Gemini, checkout in Claude, and whatever the next 10 frontier models that come out are. That will be a great experience. It'll be great for consumers. They'll find better things, great for merchants. They'll have better conversion rates. It'll be great for the platforms. They'll be able to take five to 10%, sort of like the new era Google shopping, if you're familiar with that progression. And then there's sort of this other world where agents are fairly limited on their capabilities. There's certain things that your chatbots can do, but a lot of people get to their agents and they type in, you know, I'd like to do something hard, like I'd like to do outreach for sales. And the agent will say, I actually don't know how to do that. I don't have access to any of that information. And it's very helpful if your agent has some money, has some balance, it's able to pay for things that it couldn't otherwise, and becomes more capable for a few cents at a time.

**Robert Hackett** (2:56)
So you're basically seeing two different worlds. One that is largely intermediated by a sort of like conventional LLM surface, like ChatTPT, where you're asking for recommendations and asking for it to kind of go till the last mile and choose a product for you, and the platform gets some cut of the transaction, versus another world where you're deploying agents independently to go buy goods and services on your behalf.

**Sam Ragsdale** (3:21)
Yeah, I think there's like two versions of this. There's like the evolution of e-commerce, which through each platform shift, as we get the mobile era, commerce moves onto mobile, and as we get walled gardens, commerce moves into the walled gardens, there's a new form of ads, and Google shopping comes along at some point. And so people always want to buy stuff, and consumer behavior will change. The modern way that people look for information, particularly on what to buy, is through an LLM. And so it's natural that there will be some progression of commerce into two agents, particularly e-commerce, buying shoes and the internet, buying an edible arrangement, whatever it is. And then there's sort of this less skeuomorphic version, which is that the shape of the internet is changing. The way that people retrieve information and execute on information is changing with the advent of LLMs and particularly the agentic LLMs since GPT-4. And that it's possible that the internet that we've constructed over the past 20 years is not the internet that will exist in the future, that it no longer makes sense to go through Google search and then click through a web UI that tries to upsell you, etc.