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Once agents start finding, negotiating and buying on our behalf, they become participants and the economy shifts. Drawing on MIT and Harvard research, this maps ten templates where new players and markets are emerging. The harder question: which is coming for your business first?
In my previous post, I explored the MIT and Harvard report arguing that agents don’t just automate existing processes — they make new kinds of markets possible.
Once agents become active participants in commerce (Agentic Commerce) they are finding, negotiating, deciding, and buying on our behalf. Then the structure of the economy begins to shift. We start to see new kinds of players, new marketplaces, and new ways of exchanging value.
The following 10 templates for reinvention capture where those changes are already emerging, early signals of how business may evolve in an agentic world.
Agents stop being tools — they become participants.
Once agents can act, they start to buy, sell, and cooperate.
As agents transact, pricing and payments reinvent themselves.
As agents move from tools to participants, they’ll reshape not only how business gets done, but what it even means to participate in a market.
Each of these templates is a glimpse of that shift, not a prediction, but an invitation to rethink assumptions about work, competition, and value.
The real opportunity lies in reinventing around what agents do best and letting that redefinition open new spaces for human creativity.
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