As I said, there’s something happening here. The issue, though, is what exactly these companies are building, and who—if anyone—will end up using it. Yes, it’s early days and protocols have to come before applications, but it would still be helpful to see examples of ordinary consumers deploying these cash-carrying bots for everyday activities.
The easy scenario to envision is consumers giving their agents bags of stablecoins, and sending them off to negotiate and buy a pair of sneakers or something. But would this be something most of us would need? Or would it, like so much in crypto, just be an element of blockchain friction layered on something that works pretty well already?
To be fair, companies are already teasing some more tantalizing possibilities. Those include the idea of using AI agents to carry out micropayments such as purchasing a news article behind a paywall or buying a snippet of data from LinkedIn. Likewise, the parents among us would relish the idea of an agent we can trust with personal data that could sign up our children and pay for sports teams and summer camps.
We discussed all this at Fortune Crypto and concluded that this fusing of stablecoins and AI agents is the future, but that it’s too early to say what shape that future will take. It’s like trying to predict in 2008 what applications would come to populate the iPhone’s App Store, or the parable of the blind scientists and the elephant—each touching a leg or a trunk, but unable to understand how it all fits together. It may take five years or more until we know.
