Autonomous AI agents that shop and transact on users’ behalf could upend the current online advertising model, a16z Crypto argues. Sam Ragsdale, co-founder of Merit Systems, says agentic commerce will shift how products are discovered and bought, reducing the role of ads that rely on human distraction.
Ragsdale frames the internet’s business model from 1997 to 2024 as “distraction,” where ads monetize users’ partial attention. Large language models and agents, he notes, don’t get distracted in the same way, undermining that model. The global online advertising market—estimated at about $291 billion in 2025 by Mordor Intelligence—could face significant disruption as agents make purchasing decisions.
Some AI platforms are already moving toward embedded commerce. Products like “Instant Checkout” from ChatGPT and Gemini let U.S. users buy items directly inside conversations, bypassing external sites. Ragsdale predicts that as agent-driven purchases scale, consumers will find better products, merchants will see higher conversion rates, and platforms may capture fees in the 5–10% range.
However, he warns these built-in checkouts can become walled gardens: merchants must pass platform approval to participate, limiting openness and choice. Ragsdale contrasts closed systems with open protocols that let agents autonomously discover and transact with a broad set of merchants. He argues an agent restricted to pre-approved vendors is like an employee with a corporate card; an agent using open protocols is like an entrepreneur with a bank account.
Ragsdale points to emerging standards intended to enable open agentic commerce, including Coinbase’s x402 protocol and the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) developed by Tempo and Stripe, as alternatives to closed ecosystems. He suggests that advertising—a “clever hack” that helped create the free and open web and the massive data that trained LLMs—may now be declining as agentic commerce grows.
If agents learn to reliably search, compare, and transact across the open web, the economics of online discovery and monetization could change, reducing reliance on traditional ad models and shifting value toward agent services and open payment and discovery protocols.