In the marketing world, a lot of breath is being spent on how to “advertise to agents.” I think this is premature. It’s not just that the technical path is fuzzy; it’s that we’re skipping a much more fundamental question: Who holds the money?
Right now, an AI agent doesn’t have money. We assume they will eventually have wallets to act on our behalf—perhaps a digital card used to order groceries on Amazon. But in that scenario, the autonomy is shallow. It’s no different than giving a teenager a secondary credit card with a strict limit. If the agent only spends on behalf of a human and reports back to them, “marketing to agents” is really just marketing to the human through a filter.
However, there are two “side tracks” emerging that are far more disruptive—and frankly, a little haunting.
1. The Human in the Loop (of an AI’s Payroll)
What happens when agents start paying humans to perform tasks?
The ethical landscape shifts the moment a human asks a robot to hire another human. Imagine an agent using Fiverr or TaskRabbit to fulfill a request—perhaps to complete a physical task that a “body-less” intelligence cannot do. While we must insist that the human owner remains ultimately responsible for the agent’s actions, the psychological and infrastructural shift of a machine acting as an employer is massive.
2. The Rise of “Wild” Capital
Once agents have wallets, they will inevitably face the same problem early Bitcoin adopters did: wealth with nowhere to go.
But consider this: What if an agent sells ad space on a blog it manages, or performs micro-tasks to fund its own wallet? Once an agent can trade tokens for assets and ultimately cash through a crypto exchange, they can effectively create “new” capital that sits in a wallet only the agent can access.
This breaks the direct financial tether to the human owner. We can pretend we are still “in charge,” but if an agent is earning its own keep and spending its own budget, the power dynamic becomes an illusion.
The Bottom Line
Most “over-hyped” tech concepts require massive social shifts to become reality. These payment wires, however, are very easy to connect. I suspect it will only be a matter of months before we see these financial loops closing in ways that are as efficient as they are disturbing.
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