The pitch for autonomous AI agents has quietly shifted.
A year ago, agentic AI meant giving an LLM access to your local bash terminal or a calculator. Today, the conversation is about the agent economy: autonomous agents from different companies discovering one another, negotiating terms, ordering goods, and settling transactions at machine speed.
That sounds great on a slide deck. But look at how people actually build cross-enterprise agent integrations today, and you'll find a massive disconnect.
Most current implementations treat the "agent economy" as nothing more than handing an LLM an API key to a counterparty's REST endpoint, wrapping it in a system prompt, and crossing their fingers. If Company A's agent wants to buy something from Company B, either human engineers spend three months writing bespoke integration code, or Company B gives Company A's model raw access to an internal tool and prays prompt injection doesn't drain their inventory.
Neither model works.
