In a recent commentary, Yanis Varoufakis, the outspoken former finance minister of Greece, argues that artificial intelligence may strengthen the dominant digital platforms by allowing them to capture an even greater share of the economic activity that flows through them. In his example, Amazon (AMZN) is not simply a marketplace. It is an intermediary that controls the environment in which buyers and sellers meet, influences which products consumers see, and increasingly captures economic value through that control. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in the platform, he sees Amazon and similar companies becoming even more powerful, converting ordinary profits into what he calls “cloud rents.”
Agentic AI, however, raises a very different possibility. Suppose I want to buy a toy for my grandchild. Today I might go to Amazon, enter its marketplace, search among the products it presents to me, and make a choice within an environment designed and controlled by Amazon. If, however, I have an agentic AI acting on my behalf, I may no longer need to enter Amazon’s world at all. I can simply tell my agent what I am looking for, what my grandchild likes, what I want to spend, and when I need the toy. The agent can then search Amazon, Walmart (WMT), Target (TGT), specialty stores, manufacturers, reviews, prices, delivery times, and return policies and recommend—or eventually purchase—the product that best serves my interests.
A significant source of the platform power that Amazon and others currently possess could therefore diminish substantially. For Amazon’s retailing advantage has never been only its warehouses, logistics network, or vast inventory. It also benefits enormously from being the place where millions of consumers begin their buying process. Agentic AI has the potential to move that starting point away from Amazon and toward the individual’s personal agent. Which is to say, agentic AI could disintermediate the very platforms that digital technology previously made so powerful.
There is, however, an important catch. This works only if the agent is genuinely acting in my interest. If my agent is owned by Amazon, Google (GOOGL), Apple (AAPL), OpenAI, or another company whose revenues might depend on steering me toward preferred products, services, or partners, then platform power has not disappeared. It has shifted to a higher-level intermediary.
So, as we try to discern the impact AI will have on the global economy, one of the defining questions may not be how intelligent our agents become or how much more powerful existing platforms become, but whose interests those agents represent. Agentic AI could weaken today’s dominant platforms by returning control of the interface to the individual—or it could create an even more powerful platform by placing a single intermediary between the individual and nearly every economic choice. Agentic AI may not eliminate platform power. It may simply determine who gets to wield it next.
And what might that portend for the global economy and society?
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