3 SALESFORSALESFORCE FUTURESCE FUTURES ANTICIPATING PERSONAL AGENTS: VIABILITY Agent gatekeepers with access to vast stores of knowledge might radically diminish the habits of consumer research and comparison, which is where discovery-focused advertising lives. Consumers may also turn on those filters we mentioned earlier. If all this happens, the rise of personal agents could deflate the advertising revenues that power the internet the way Craigslist did to print media. Users will use something, and pay for it—either with time, attention, data, or their hard-earned dollars—if they find it useful. Those who subscribe to ChatGPT or Google Gemini today pay for access to a baseline set of skills, but it remains an open question if people will continue to pay for intelligence as competition grows fiercer. When personal AI requires additional skills to accomplish tasks, a plausible outcome may be the proliferation of pay-per- skill marketplaces where consumers pay to upgrade their agents in an incremental and case-by-case way. If personal AI agents are able to accomplish high-order tasks and goals, one can also imagine people paying for outcomes in the same way we see now in some B2B sectors. In the multi-agent world, where agents are interacting with other agents at the speed of light, we will likely see an emergence of a new economy where deals and transactions are completed with personal agents acting on our behalf. Consider how personal agents could deliver growth through machine-to-machine, or M2M transactions. Gartner and others have been exploring these ideas recently, but they were anticipated as far back as 2011 by economist W. Brian Arthur in “The Second Economy,” a classic article foreshadowing the rise of “autonomous economy” where machines communicating with each other drive economic value independent of humans. Chris Noessel’s concept of “post-attention value,” Kevin Ashton’s “Internet of Things,” and other ideas also point us to new opportunities this world presents. ISSUE 1: PERSONAL AI | 24