10+ observations on the greatest opportunities in AI agents right now

10+ observations on the greatest opportunities in AI agents right now:

And some ideas that are keeping me up at night.

The new buyer on the internet is an AI agent. Imagine billions of new customers showing up with money to spend but they only shop via MCP. That's what's happening. No MCP server means you're invisible to the fastest growing buyer on the internet.
Every franchise system in America (30,000+) needs an agent layer and none of them have one. One founder per franchise vertical. That's 30,000 businesses waiting.
Everyone said "distribution is the only moat" a year ago. Now I'd add that the only moat is distribution plus memory. The company that has your audience AND your agent's accumulated context is impossible to leave.
Consumer mobile is more interesting than it's been since 2012. Apps can finally DO things for you instead of showing you things. The next wave of $100M apps are being built right now.
The most interesting startup nobody has built is an agent marketplace where you rent access to someone else's trained agent. A recruiter spent 6 months training a sourcing agent on healthcare hiring. That agent is worth renting to every other healthcare recruiter on earth. The agent itself becomes the product.
A sorta strange phenomenon that's happening right now is agents are developing preferences. Give the same agent the same task 100 times and it starts developing patterns in how it approaches it. Nobody is studying this yet. But the agents that develop good patterns are worth more than the ones that don't. That's a new kind of asset.
Dead internet theory is about to become dead SaaS theory. Half the apps you use will quietly replace their support team, their onboarding team, and their content team with agents. You won't notice for months. Then you'll realize you haven't talked to a human at that company in a year.
The most valuable data in the world right now is sitting in the support tickets of small or mid tier SaaS companies. Every ticket is a customer telling you exactly what to build next. Mine this.
The best AI products feel like they're reading your mind. The worst ones feel like filling out a form with extra steps.
An interesting arbitrage I've noticed lately is hiring a human VA for $20/hour to supervise an AI agent that does$ 200/hour work. The human just checks the output.
The managed AI agent business is becoming the new agency model. $5k/month per client. You build it, run it, maintain it. The client gets a digital employee they never have to think about. This will be a$ 50 B+ category.
Right now there are probably millions of agents running on autopilot that their creators forgot about. Still burning tokens. Still sending emails. Still scraping websites. Still costing money. The "find and kill your zombie agents" tool is a product that writes itself.

Written by Greg Isenberg

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