The end of ads? AI agents are about to change how we buy

Agents can now do almost anything a human can do with a computer. So what happens when they start spending money on your behalf?

Sam Ragsdale (founder and CEO of Merit Systems, a startup building infrastructure for the agentic economy) joins a16z crypto's Eddy Lazzarin, Noah Levine, and Robert Hackett on the open agentic commerce stack, and why the internet's business model is about to get rewired.

00:00 – Intro 
01:33 – Two flavors of agentic commerce 
04:30 – What is an agent, actually? 
12:57 – The headless merchant thesis 
17:17 – What happens to existing friction? 
24:45 – The economic contract of the web is broken 
27:46 – Will agents get distracted by ads? 
35:152– Stablecoins vs. credit cards 
41:54 – Sam's bear case on interchange 
49:11 – The killer app for agentic commerce
 

Sam Ragsdale on X: /samrags_ 
Eddy Lazzarin on X: /eddylazzarin 
Noah Levine on X: /nlevine19 
Robert Hackett on X: /rhackett 
 

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