a16z: Welcome to the B2A Economy Era! After Decades of Blocking Bots, Companies Now Line Up to Please Them

Authors: Olivia Moore, Justine Moore, Partners at a16z

Compiled by: Big Pliers, PANews

Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from a deep report titled "Welcome to the B2A Economy" written by Olivia Moore and Justine Moore, partners at the renowned venture capital firm a16z. For decades, major websites and e-commerce platforms have struggled with how to keep bots out using verification codes. But now, the tide has completely turned; the main users on the internet are no longer humans, but AI agents. When AI is no longer just chatting with you but starts directly picking products, purchasing memberships, and checking out, the underlying logic of doing business is completely overturned. In this major shift from doing "business with people (B2C)" to doing "business with AI (B2A)", how should companies seize the new wave of growth? Which sectors will give rise to new giants? Here is the full translation:

In today’s internet, the main users are no longer humans, but AI agents.

Currently, the vast majority of online traffic is contributed by AI agents, with over half of the newly published articles written by them, and even the majority of the code that programmers ultimately deploy is generated by them.

This is a typical characteristic of the early stages of a technological revolution (platform shift): everyone can clearly see that more and more people are using it, but how to make money from it and what new business models will emerge is still unclear to most.

Looking back, every technological revolution changes two things simultaneously: what people can do and how businesses find customers:

• In the era of personal computers and the internet, it was like opening a store online that anyone could visit;
• In the subsequent era of mobile internet, that store was directly placed in everyone’s pocket;
• Now, in the AI era, AI has changed what people can do, but its transformation of "how businesses find customers (distribution channels)" has just begun.

As AI agents evolve from simply "answering your questions" to "directly helping you get things done", they will increasingly make decisions for us: which products to use, which services to subscribe to, and where to spend our money.

Companies that treat AI agents as "VIP clients" are likely to experience explosive growth; while those that have not yet reacted may find it difficult to survive. For many years, major e-commerce platforms have been building walls to keep bots out, but now they must compete to capture the business of these bots.

If AI agents can truly reach the general public and become indispensable tools, they will unleash the largest unfulfilled dividends in the AI field: a true platform revolution. Every previous platform shift (from computer web pages to mobile apps) has tied together "new product features" and "new customer acquisition channels". However, the current AI is exceptionally strong in "product features" but has fallen short in "customer acquisition channels", which is why, apart from ChatGPT, other AI products aimed at the general public have not truly broken through.

However, signs of a significant change in customer acquisition channels have already emerged. For many companies, large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok have become massive and highly valuable traffic entry points. According to data released by the e-commerce website building platform ++Shopify++, in the first quarter of 2026, the traffic directed to their platform stores by AI surged eightfold year-on-year, while the number of orders directly facilitated by AI search skyrocketed nearly thirteen times. Moreover, this momentum is accelerating: cybersecurity company Human Security found that between August and October alone, traffic from AI agent browsers grew eightfold, with Muse contributing the majority (60%), while OpenAI’s products collectively accounted for 30%.

This is akin to how creating a website is more effective at precisely capturing customers than putting up a billboard by the roadside; theoretically, AI agents should be an even more powerful sales channel—because they hold the most in-depth and specific personal data and needs of users. So far, the facts have proven this to be true: compared to ordinary traffic, consumers referred by AI browse more seriously, have a higher conversion rate for purchases, and are less likely to close the webpage immediately (bounce rate). Even before AI agents became widespread, it was estimated that 11% of American consumers would consult AI for advice before shopping on e-commerce sites.

Currently, most of this AI traffic is still achieved by "simulating human browsing". In other words, AI agents either take over the user's browser directly or create a virtual computer and browser in the background, clicking around the screen like a real person to get things done. However, we are beginning to see the emergence of something akin to an "AI agent dedicated app store", and it’s a more powerful version, meaning various connectors, plugins, and MCP protocols that allow AI agents to directly call third-party tools and websites without having to awkwardly simulate clicks.

For example: we tried to have ChatGPT use plugins like Krea, Descript, and Eleven Labs to help us create and edit a video advertisement. As a result, it coordinated between these software applications by itself, and to complete the video, it even successfully pitched us to upgrade to the paid membership of Descript.

As underlying platforms begin to allow users to "lend" their account identities or tokens to other software for tasks (like "one-click login with ChatGPT account"), having AI agents help us register accounts or make purchases will only become smoother. Eventually, human intervention will be unnecessary; AI agents will be able to select and install the tools they need to work by themselves. Currently, Claude has already allowed company administrators to enable various plugins for the entire company at once. Just yesterday, OpenAI launched enterprise features in ChatGPT, allowing companies to claim their enterprise homepage, upload product catalogs, and view how users interact with their brand on ChatGPT in the background.

In this new economic wave of B2A (business to agents), several types of companies may reap substantial rewards:

• Companies with AI agents and underlying models: When it comes to "AI agents for the general public", most people think of independent software shells like Instinct, Muse, and Wabi. However, we believe that as the operational capabilities of the underlying AI models become stronger, it won’t be long before all products operate in an "agent" manner. In this regard, ChatGPT, with 1.2 billion weekly active users, has an extremely enticing opportunity ahead.
• New products born from AI agents: Just as Amazon had to rely on the internet to emerge, there would be no Didi or Uber without smartphones. We expect that AI agents will also give birth to native new species of this era. It’s still hard to predict exactly what they will look like, but several trends are already quite clear: for example, fully automated micro-enterprises, trading platforms or social networks facilitated by AI, and optimization tools that help people manage everything automatically.
• Established companies that know how to please AI agents: Large language models are now important traffic sources for many websites, giving rise to a new industry called "Generative Engine Optimization (GEO, which can be understood as AI-focused SEO)". However, GEO mainly focuses on "getting AI to discover you"; future AI agents will go further, directly handling "comparing products" and "making payments" when buying or registering for services, which represents a much larger market.
• Companies providing supporting infrastructure for AI agents: To enable AI agents to smoothly run errands on behalf of humans in the real world, they need a complete set of dedicated tools. Even though the number of AI agents is still relatively small, we have already seen existing payment systems, anti-fraud and identity verification systems, and various communication tools (like iMessage, phone calls, emails, etc.) starting to become overwhelmed.

We actually have a ready-made case study for how all this will develop in the future: programming agents, which have completely changed the way programmers work. As of September 2026, over 40% of code submissions on GitHub, the world’s largest code hosting platform, were initially drafted by AI agents; just six months ago, this figure was only 17%.

Like the AI agents used by ordinary consumers, programming agents also need to rely on external tools to get the job done. For example, if a user asks an AI agent to help build a website, the AI may need to handle databases, server hosting, user login verification, email functionality, and website monitoring. In this process, not only have AI agent models and coding software (like Cursor, Codex, Claude Code, Cognition, and platforms like Replit, Lovable, and Base44 that can write code just by speaking) succeeded, but a large number of companies providing supporting tools have also soared:

• ++Supabase++ revealed in June 2026 that over 60% of new databases on their platform were created directly by AI tools;
• ++Neon++ stated in May 2025 that automated agents handled 80% of their new database deployments;
• ++Stripe++ announced in June 2026 that AI agents accounted for nearly 40% of their development documentation access, and 70% of API resource requests initiated via command line (CLI) were made by AI;
• ++Vercel++ reported in October 2026 that the number of website deployments triggered by AI agents surged 28 times over the past year.

Just think about it: programmers make up less than 1% of all workers globally. If the remaining 99% of ordinary people also start using AI agents, what a stunning scene that would be?

This article is the first in our series exploring the "agent economy". If we merely call this "AI e-commerce", we would be underestimating this opportunity. Indeed, AI agents will help bring products and offline services to market and increase transaction volumes; but more importantly, they will completely reshuffle and change the paths of online traffic, tokens, and real money flowing to various digital software products. Currently, due to fears of encountering online fraud and malicious chargebacks, the vast majority of large enterprises are still desperately blocking AI agents' access traffic. But we firmly believe that in the face of this increasingly valuable business wave, they will ultimately open their arms.

In the coming weeks, we will release more in-depth articles and data, discussing how ordinary people are currently using AI agents, the criteria AI agents use to decide which websites and products to allocate traffic to, how the supporting infrastructure around agents is being built, and what obstacles remain to enable AI agents to smoothly handle payments for us.

This field is undergoing new changes almost every day, and the following chart is our most comprehensive overview of the entire market landscape so far. It includes various AI agents themselves as well as the underlying infrastructure that supports their existence and operation.

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