Warning: Investors Must Prepare For The Agentic Takeover

Joseph Carlson (0:00)

In February of this year, an article was released that shook the markets. It caused a widespread panic, and it caused many stocks to sell down over 7% to 10%, and they continued to go down just by the release of this article. And it was a narrative about a possible future, a situation where agents have took over the world. This is the article from Citrony. It was published February 22nd. Ever since then, many companies, including SaaS companies, went through what's called the SaaSpocalypse. Citrony Research was already the biggest financial sub-stack in the world with millions of readers. And this also made it even bigger. This went hyperviral. The article title was the 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis. Intelligence is abundant. We have AI that knows about everything, and so everybody knows about everything. But that wasn't even their major point. Their biggest point of this article is friction going to zero. Now how does friction go to zero? It goes to zero through agents. Agents are an extension of humans. They're robots that can go out and do things that humans normally do. Humans normally go and they fill out forms, they look at user interfaces, they purchase things, they shop for things, they compare things together. All of that stuff is friction. And in a world where agents do all of that for you, it erases that friction. Now Citroën didn't just talk about agentic technology and the potential of it, they also listed specific companies and how they think it might work out. For example, they talked about ServiceNow decelerating. They made fake headlines like Mastercard's revenue decelerating down to 6% year over year growth. They said it would destroy the job market, that software companies were getting obliterated. And they highlighted DoorDash as the poster child of the type of company that would be disrupted by agentic technology. Now, while Citroën's article was very thought provoking, it was well written, it was convincing at the time, it was also full of flaws. Many of these companies aren't going to be affected in the way that they've illustrated. And I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. We didn't really have agentic technology then like we do now. Times changed quickly. In just a number of months, we've had technology released that is truly agentic technology. The first example of this in a big consumer way is Meta's Muse.

Meta just recently released an app called Muse. I've mentioned it before, but the more that I've used this app, the more that I realize that it has a lot of these type of things in it, it is reducing friction dramatically.

And for those of you that think that Meta's Muse is like another Chachibetee, another Grok, another Anthropix Claude, it's not. It is entirely different. It feels very different. It's the first time since the very beginning of using AI, where I thought it was incredible AI could code, that I was wowed again. I opened up the Meta Muse app, and it was just immediately different than Chachibetee. It wasn't an empty chat box that spits out information. It was this helpful assistant that will help you accomplish anything you want to do. It said it could do things like book hotel reservations. It can book restaurants for you. It can join your email and clear out your email box and unsubscribe from unwanted emails.

It can organize trips. It can plan things for you, or it can shop on your behalf. It can just shop for you.

I thought, can it really book restaurants? And it said, yes, it can. It can link up to OpenTable, or it can verify directly on the restaurant's website.

And that was impressive in and of itself.

But it got me thinking, when I can book a restaurant through OpenTable without visiting OpenTable's app, that changes things. I'm working through an agent that's talking to OpenTable, and I don't have to see OpenTable's sponsored listings. I don't have to deal with their little promotions. I don't even have to have the OpenTable app on my phone. It can go in and just book things on my behalf right from this text box.

Another thing that was interesting is it doesn't just do restaurant reservations, but it also does the commerce in a serious way. I asked it to look up Nike shoes, very specific ones that my brother-in-law was looking for, and it searched the web far and wide. It brought up its own little browser. It searched through all different websites, looking at reviews, trying to find the best prices and the exact shoe match. It was like having a secretary or an executive assistant spending the next 30 minutes of their time specifically trying to accomplish that task. And then just today, I decided that I wanted to try out more of the shopping and see if it could tackle a harder task. I have four kids, one of them is a newborn, so I have three kids that were feeding normally that we have to shop at the grocery store. And for two of them, they have specific allergies, like dairy and nut allergies.