The economic consequences of finally getting around to it
My Bank of America “relationship manager” keeps emailing me to move money from an essentially zero-interest checking account into a savings account. My mother texted me about it again yesterday. I help my companies structure private-credit deals with fundamentally new underwriting standards, and read about interest rates every day. I still haven't moved the cash.
I'll sleep on a plane five nights out of eight for something I think matters. I also drop things constantly, out of boredom and lack of discipline. I'd like it to be more practical (acceptable?) to be as focused and lazy as I am.
About ten years ago, I swerved to avoid an absentminded tourist coming off the Golden Gate Bridge, crashed my bike, and broke a finger. An ambulance was sent, which I refused to take. I ended up fighting a debt-collection agency, for months, over snail mail and hours on hold. Eventually I just conceded, ready to flip a table over.
How often do we give up without changing our minds?
Instinct, an AI assistant, has already handled medical-billing mistakes from start to finish for some its users. I wish I could have forwarded mine.
At the Sierra Summit last week, an executive said it to me outright: friction had been a very good business model, and the company would need to update theirs. Somewhere, a CRM still records your exhaustion as loyal recurring revenue.
At the same summit, Sierra, Instinct and Meta announced Personal Agent Protocol, a proposed standard for companies to recognize and work with a customer's agent. Bank of America has joined as a design partner. My bank is preparing to deal with my agent before I've managed to move the money myself.
The bank has benefited from my inattention even while its employee has been trying to help me overcome it. Apple is losing a sale to the same problem. It should understand me as a customer who wants a new phone every eighteen months and is too lazy to deal with getting one. I don't want to transfer everything over and log into everything again. Handle that for me and I'll buy it automatically.
Before elevators, upper-floor apartments could rent for less. A building owner studying the rent roll might conclude that tenants preferred being closer to the street. Install an elevator and you can charge extra for putting them farther away. People like views and quiet. They just don't want to carry their groceries up six flights of stairs.
There are big second order effects. Joe Gebbia, chief design officer of the United States, is trying to make public services simple to use. In a randomized trial run by Amy Finkelstein and Matthew Notowidigdo, information and help applying tripled food-stamp enrollment among likely-eligible older adults, from 6 to 18 percent in nine months. Agentic software is likely to increase what is the government is expected to pay out. It would have to fund that participation or change what it offers.
In an interview, Instinct founder Noah Shinn imagines an agent proactively arranging dinner while you're coming home from the airport. He expects easier ordering to bring delivery services more business. I could become a better DoorDash customer without ever opening the app.
I recently asked the team at Baseten what was still hard to automate in underwriting the 150-odd companies from which it buys compute. All things email feel like the obvious realm of agents, now. However, getting suppliers to answer, pulling (even live) numbers out of them is the easy part. The hard part is knowing when a supplier’s claims are reliable.
An incompetent supplier can send immaculate JSON. Sometimes you have to get on a plane and see whether the building can do what the spreadsheet says, or if networking components have arrived, or get a supplier's supplier to validate that bills have been paid. Following up forever won't magically create new capacity, but automating some of the chase lets the Baseten team look at more suppliers and spend the time it saves on the questions that are still hard: who will actually deliver, and how to make it such that more cluster operators do!
I'm not going to start shopping for interest rates every morning. But I might authorize an agent to do it and become a relentless rate shopper while paying exactly as little attention as I do now. A bank could keep me perfectly happy and still have to win over my personal agent every day. I'm curious how many industries work this way. What will they look like once friction and inattention stops driving the revenue forecast?
