22) Digital Bazaar

Behind-the-scenes building Vambrace AI, a company on a mission to figure out its mission. Please pardon the stream-of-consciousness style. Subscribe to follow along or visit the site here:

(typos are to make sure you’re paying attention)

Introductory Remarks

Dear Vambracers —

In last week’s post, RoT: Return on Time, I somewhat-emotionally waxed loquacious on how to allocate time while pursuing an entrepreneurial endeavor. I also think there were some heuristics there for more general decision-making around use of time. I’m still quite drawn to the notion of “constructive” uses of time—particularly as AI disrupts traditional expectations around output-per-labor-hour.

I also received feedback from my fiercest critics (my parents) that I used “like” too much last week, so I’m committed to a like-free existence this week. Thus there will be zero likes within the confines of this httpenthouse! Aside from, naturally, the likes needed to communicate that I will not be using any likes this week. But that’s apophasis for ya! (albeit somewhat obtuse) ..Moving on…

Digital Bazaar

In this week’s post, I want to sharpen my thoughts around the future of digital interaction and agentic commerce. Let’s start with some definitions!

• Commerce: “the activity of buying and selling, especially on a large scale.”

  • Let’s specifically note “especially on a large scale.”

  • Let’s also acknowledge the implicit assumption that there are multiple parties involved in a transaction (another word for buying and selling).

  • And finally let’s clarify that one entity’s sale is another entity’s purchase, pretty much by definition (I mean, duh!).

• Agent: “systems where LLMs dynamically direct their own processes and tool usage, maintaining control over how they accomplish tasks.”

  • Let’s particularly note “dynamically direct” and “maintaining control” and “accomplish tasks”—so pretty much the actual meat and potatoes of the definition and perhaps therefore not worthy of particular note.

  • Of additional note here: in practice, agents are pretty much just comprehensive documents that explicitly define identity and behavior for some LLM system. This document basically comprises the agent’s genetic coding (currently). I’m sure at some point in the future we could define agent-native behavioral and identity-based encoding systems that more efficiently (i.e., token-efficient) dictate behavior and identity.

• Interaction: “the mutual or reciprocal action or effect between two or more people, objects, or systems.”

  • Let’s note, here, “mutual or reciprocal” and then “people, objects, or systems.”

Why did we make particular note of these things? I’m not yet sure. But they feel significant.

The current state of agentic commerce: Agentic consumption

One of the topics du jour is agentic consumption, which is effectively when agents find products, on behalf of a consumer, that adhere to certain parameters (cost, environmental impact, etc.). You can imagine a world in the not-too-distant future where we each have one or multiple personal shopping agents that go out and actually scour the web to find the best deals and transact on our behalf. You can even imagine a situation where connected devices maintain an inventory of critical household goods and proactively replenish those goods pursuant to some price-optimization equation (this basically happens naively right now with purchase subscriptions).

We’ve seen this new frontier of agentic consumption begin to take shape within the digital arena of ChatGPT and other chat-based searches (s/o Claude). The new focus for consumer brands and companies that sell goods and services is GEO, Generative Engine Optimization. How do you create content and structure your digital presence to ensure that chat-based crawlers can find information about your company and then surface that information to consumers? Right now it’s still consumers that press buttons to effect a transaction, but some percentage of transactions will be fully agentic pretty soon.

So this, I think, is where the world is focused currently: on the agentic consumption side of the equation. How can you create consumption-agents that adhere to some behavioral and economic parameters to procure the optimal product on behalf of their human counterparts? How do you (the agent) find the best Vitamin C serum on Amazon based on some high-level inputs? And from here, it’s important to note that there are many similar Vitamin C serums on Amazon—so how does a consumption-agent decide when faced with tens of virtually identical products?

The future of agentic commerce: Agentic persuasion

So I think it naturally follows from all of the above that, eventually, every brand and every product will probably have its own fleet of agents specifically designed to persuade, negotiate, and transact with consumption-agents on behalf of the brand / business. And this is where I’m really excited. If a consumption-agent is sent on a mission to buy an affordable Vitamin C on Amazon, then how will it navigate a crowded field of sales-agents—and how will sales-agents stand out in that crowded field?

I believe the answer won’t be that obvious—and I have no idea what the answer will be. My intuition tells me that persuasion and personality will actually be valuable to brands and businesses as they sell to consumption-agents. It’s possible that sheer, shameless begging is the most effective form of agentic persuasion. Maybe it’s humor. Maybe it’s cruelty. Maybe it’s (some agentic notion of) beauty. Maybe it’s sex. Maybe it’s casual coolness. Who knows! But I do feel fairly strongly that this is sort of where agentic commerce is going.

The unknowable nature of what will compel a consumption-agent to transact with a sales-agent is a new frontier for digital commerce in the coming years. Again, we have no clue what will be “compelling” or “persuasive” to a consumption-agent, and it might be different for each consumption-agent, especially if they’re at all affected by the psychological, emotional, and economic disposition of their consumer-counterpart.

The future of agentic commerce: Agentic bazaar

So I basically envision a world in which the internet becomes this sort of digital wasteland and agentic battleground where marketplaces (e.g., Amazon, Grubhub, etc., any retailer) set up these digital bazaars and that’s how digital commerce unfolds in the future. These digital bazaars will effectively sell preferred positions on the grounds to certain sales-agents, who will have “first go” at the consumption-agents as they mosey down through the bazaar.

These digital bazaars already exist in the form of apps on our phones and websites on our computers—they’ll just eventually be abstracted away as we increasingly turn to consumption-agents to transact on our behalf. [And this is consistent with my broader belief that the internet will soon be completely abstracted away—and it will serve as a latent information layer for humanity, and we’ll rely entirely on agents to procure and extract information for us.]

And you can imagine now a world in which every consumption-agent tasked with making a purchase basically walks down this digital bazaar—where the placement is dictated by some bazaar-agent (on behalf of the marketplace)—and interacts with sales-agents from each brand. I also think that eventually negotiation parameters will be encoded within the consumption-agents’ DNA and the sales-agents’ DNA—including soft skills.

There will be effectively a lot of virtually-instant micro-negotiations that unfold as the consumption-agent walks down the digital street. Sales-agents with preferred placement will have some authority to negotiate on behalf of their brand-counterpart, and consumption-agents will have some authority to haggle on behalf of their consumer-counterpart.

And the interesting thing is we (the humans) will be abstracted out of this massive game of digital capitalistic fisticuffs. We’ll just experience: (1) I need Vitamin C serum less than $20 and at least 15% concentration; and (2) purchase complete! But our consumption-agents will be IN IT with brand sales-agents, duking it out in this digital bazaar.

Looking Forward

That’s all from me today! I think I might talk more next week about how I’m dipping a toe into this exciting digital future—albeit in a small and measured way.

I will say, taking a step back, it feels good to be a bit more commercial and techno-futurist this week. Things have swayed a bit more emotional / psychological over the past month or two—which is how life goes sometimes.

But I’m happy to be back in the arena—duking it out in the physical bazaar of our organic existence.

Have a wonderful week!

Sincerely,

Luke