A World of Agents
Artificial intelligence is entering a new phase as autonomous agents begin executing real work across the economy—a secular shift that, in our view, may reshape industries and help define tomorrow's market leaders.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing into a new era as autonomous digital agents start performing real work. In our view, this development marks a major secular shift with the potential to transform industries and accelerate disruption. For investors, could agentic AI become a defining force in determining tomorrow’s market leaders?
- AI agents are autonomous software programs that can reason and execute tasks across applications and business processes. For example, some software companies have deployed AI agents across their IT and customer service platforms that autonomously resolve employee and customer issues by understanding context, generating step-by-step solutions, and escalating to human agents when needed. Walmart's Trend-to-Product AI agent helps source fashion products and reduces the traditional six-month clothing production timeline by up to 18 weeks, from initial design concepts to in-store availability.1
- In the chart above, the IDC estimates that the number of active agents could exceed 1 billion by the end of the decade, highlighting the potential for a profound shift in how digital work gets done and how businesses generate productivity gains. Moreover, this new workforce of agents could generate more than 217 billion actions per day, consuming roughly 3.7 trillion tokens, which are the basic units of text or data processed by AI models.2
- In our view, software companies will need to embed, orchestrate, and leverage agents to remain competitive, while those tied to all-in-one traditional licensing models may face meaningful disruption as agents increasingly replace or disintermediate legacy software workflows. We believe this sharp increase in token activity signals a powerful rise in compute demand (see also AI’s Growing Appetite), which could create meaningful long term opportunities for the companies that provide the data center equipment, power, and infrastructure enabling this growth.
1Walmart Corporate News (April 9, 2025) - "In an Ever-Changing Environment, Walmart Uses GenAI To Create Cool for Customers"
2IDC, “Agent Adoption: The IT Industry’s Next Great Inflection Point,” December 2025; IDC FutureScape 2026.
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Companies involved in, or exposed to, AI-related businesses may have limited product lines, markets, financial resources or personnel as they face intense competition and potentially rapid product obsolescence, and many depend significantly on retaining and growing their consumer base. These companies may be substantially exposed to the market and business risks of other industries or sectors, and may be adversely affected by negative developments impacting those companies, industries or sectors, as well as by loss or impairment of intellectual property rights or misappropriation of their technology. Companies that utilize AI could face reputational harm, competitive harm, and legal liability, and/or an adverse effect on business operations as content, analyses, or recommendations that AI applications produce may be deficient, inaccurate, biased, misleading or incomplete, may lead to errors, and may be used in negligent or criminal ways. AI technology could face increasing regulatory scrutiny in the future, which may limit the development of this technology and impede the future growth. AI companies, especially smaller companies, tend to be more volatile than companies that do not rely heavily on technology.
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