In The Industrialization of Intelligence, I argued that AI industry analysis was plagued by “chatbot myopia.” The chatbot was the first widely used application of an LLM, and it certainly put AI on the map for much of the population. Nevertheless, it is one application, and agentic AI will represent a much broader, core application space for AI. The paper also argued that the economic analysis of agentic AI should treat agents as a form of “digital labor” rather than another software wave; many rules of traditional software economics will hold with digital labor, and many will not, so it’s important to utilize an agent-specific framework for analysis.
