AI Agents Will Transform the Online Economy

The modern Internet is, for better or for worse, built on advertising. But the advent of autonomous AI agents that can search for information and execute tasks on behalf of users could soon upend this business model and transform the Web, say researchers.

Most of the platforms people rely on to find information online, including search engines and social media sites, make the bulk of their money from advertising, says Jun Wang, a professor of computer science at University College London. By harvesting data on user’s browsing habits and interests they offer marketers the ability to precisely target individuals with personalized content, which has seen these websites corner a growing proportion of advertising spending.

But rapidly improving AI chatbots are quickly becoming people’s go-to way to find information on the Web, says Wang. And the trend is only likely to accelerate as tech companies roll out AI agents, which can interface with external tools and APIs to autonomously carry out more complex online tasks for users, such as doing in-depth research or making purchases. This has led to predictions that we may soon see the emergence of an “agentic Web” where the primary users of the Internet become AI bots rather than humans.

“The agentic Web is going to change everything,” says Wang, predicting that people will increasingly rely on agents as proxies to navigate the Web on their behalf. And in a recent position paper posted on the preprint server ArXiv, he and colleagues outline how this could lead to a new “agent attention economy” where advertisers increasingly jockey to be noticed by agents rather humans.

How AI Agents Will Navigate the Web

Wang is well-qualified to talk about the topic, having spent most of his career on the technology that power today’s online economy. He has worked on recommendation algorithms that parse browsing data to identify the content and products that might interest individuals, and he helped develop real-time auction technology that lets marketers compete to have their ads displayed to specific users. But these systems will need to adapt considerably as agents become more prevalent online, says Wang.

One of the key enablers for a future agentic Web is the Model Context Protocol (MCP) developed by Anthropic, which provides a standardized way for AI models to interact with things like databases, APIs, and other Web services. In order to carry out user instructions, agents will break them down into sub-tasks and then call on various external MCP-enabled tools to help solve each smaller problem. For example, if asked to plan a holiday, the agent might interface with map services tools, hotel booking platforms, and weather information providers.

Agents will be faced with the same challenge as today’s human Internet users, says Wang; they’ll have to select which of many available services and tools to rely on for each subtask. Providers will also face the same challenge of ensuring their…