Opening digital markets so AI can shop — and negotiate — for you

Imagine a world where you have a digital assistant that can do more than just respond to your questions in a chat. In this future, you could send your assistant out to a digital marketplace to order your groceries, book a flight, or even negotiate the terms of your apartment lease.

These AI-powered agents could interact with agents from companies on your behalf and advocate for you — all without you needing to lift a finger.

That future isn’t just for the world of science fiction. In a paper published Thursday in Communications of the ACM, Microsoft researchers say this kind of open agentic economy is the most beneficial way for AI to move forward, maximizing opportunity for both businesses and individuals.

What is an open agentic economy?

Currently, as the agentic economy takes shape, many of the AI agents we interact with exist in what’s called a “walled garden.” If you need help rescheduling a flight, for example, you might chat with the AI agent on the airline’s website. But in an open agentic economy, the researchers say, there’d be a “web of agents” that form a decentralized ecosystem where AI agents can interact freely with each other without being confined to the “walled garden” of just one website.

They compare the open agentic economy to the promise of the World Wide Web, in that any agent could transact with any other. Assistant agents would play a role similar to web browsers, and service agents similar to websites.

One of the paper’s authors, Microsoft researcher David Rothschild, says he and his colleagues chose to write about this topic because they’re concerned that “walled gardens” will pop up on a few major platforms and could stymie innovation. Rothschild points out that some companies have already built large platforms that they will want to keep existing users in.

“There are a very few companies that have captured all of our digital time,” he explains. “They have an enormous percentage of our attention, and they will do everything they can to keep you siloed into their platforms.”

Rothschild says starting the discussion of an open agentic economy now is critical.

“Otherwise, momentum and ease are going to push us into that version of walled gardens,” he says. “And that would mean less overall welfare and opportunity for society.”

Why have an open agentic economy?

In the paper, Microsoft researchers say that letting many different AI agents operate in an open market is the best path forward. In this setup, the agents help markets run more smoothly, make it easier for people to switch between services, and give more people access to digital tools and services in a decentralized way.

Co-author and Program Manager Matt Vogel says he believes an open agentic economy will be beneficial for both people and companies.

“Consumers can find the best business that matches their needs and very easily switch between them,” Vogel says. “They’re not stuck and locked into one of them.”

And businesses will move from attempting to get their product in front of people via advertising to improving the product, Rothchild says.

“We foresee a movement from what we’ll call the ‘attention economy’ to the ‘preference economy,’” he explains. “The hope is that there is still money being spent by brands to make them more successful, but they’re doing it in a way that really both improves the product and improves our understanding of the product rather than simply getting in front of us.”

How to get to an open agentic economy

The researchers say that to form an open agentic economy, several key technological and structural developments will be required. First, the widespread adoption of assistant and service agents and programmatic inter-agent communication. Once people and businesses adopt to using AI agents as their representatives, those agents must be able to communicate, unscripted, with each other.

This would be done in a neutral digital marketplace, akin to how the International Space Station was created in cooperation with businesses and governments, rather than on any one platform owned by a single company.

For the agents to do their jobs, the researchers say there would need to be standardized frameworks and protocols so the agents can both discover each other and conduct secure interactions.

While consumers would adopt and train their personal AI assistant agents, researchers say, several groups must be involved in building and governing the open agentic economy: technology companies, standards bodies, businesses/service providers, governments and regulatory bodies. The researchers contend this would help ensure the new marketplaces stay open, competitive and secure.

“To ensure a safe and prosperous future with an open marketplace, more technology needs to be developed to create a very close space in which the agents are highly constrained, but that also adds to some safety and some control,” Rothschild says. “This is a tradeoff that we think is important to confront in an open way — an open research way and an open development way. We believe that it’s worth it to fight for the more open future.”

Learn more in “The Agentic Economy.” For more information on related work, check out the Microsoft Research Blog post on Magentic Marketplace, an open-source simulation environment for studying agentic markets.

 

Lead image courtesy of da-kuk/Getty Images.