The Agents that are going to rule us all, how are they being made?
The promises are everywhere. Your AI agent will book your flights. Schedule your meetings. Write your emails. Manage your calendar. Handle your customer service. Run your entire business while you sleep.
It sounds revolutionary. Until you realize who's selling it.
The same platforms that turned social media into surveillance capitalism. The same companies that transformed search into an advertising auction. The same forces that made "software eating the world" feel more like extraction than innovation.
And suddenly, agentic AI starts looking less like liberation and more like the ultimate rent-seeking machine.
But what if we're thinking about this wrong?
The Rent-Seeking Trap: How AI Agents Become Digital Landlords
The current agentic AI narrative follows a predictable pattern.
Build the platform. Control the interactions. Extract value from every transaction. Scale infinitely.
Your "AI assistant" isn't just helping you—it's intermediating every relationship, every decision, every purchase. It sits between you and the world, collecting data, steering choices, and taking its cut. This isn't innovation. It's digital feudalism with better marketing.
| Traditional Business | Agentic AI Platform |
|---|---|
| Sell products/services directly | Intermediate all transactions |
| Compete on value delivered | Control the interaction layer |
| Customer owns the relationship | Platform owns the relationship |
| Revenue from creation | Revenue from extraction |
The Cognitive Liberation Alternative
But agentic AI doesn't have to be a rent-extraction machine.
It could be something far more interesting: a cognitive amplifier that actually distributes power rather than concentrating it.
Think about the real barriers that keep small businesses small, individuals isolated, and expertise hoarded:
Information Asymmetry: The big players know things you don't. They have access to market intelligence, regulatory insights, and operational knowledge that would transform your business—if you could access it.
Cognitive Overload: Running a business means juggling countless complex systems. Tax codes, compliance requirements, market dynamics, customer psychology. Most people can master one or two domains deeply, but modern business requires fluency across dozens.
Institutional Memory Gaps: When experts retire, their knowledge disappears. When successful founders exit, their hard-won insights vanish. We're constantly reinventing wheels because wisdom doesn't transfer well.
These aren't technology problems. They're knowledge distribution problems.
And agentic AI—designed right—could solve them.
Small Business Superpowers: AI as Knowledge Democratizer
Imagine an AI agent that doesn't intermediate your relationships but amplifies your capabilities.
One that captures the decision-making frameworks of successful entrepreneurs and makes them accessible to first-time founders.
One that encodes the regulatory navigation strategies of experienced lawyers and distributes them to businesses that can't afford full-time legal counsel.
One that synthesizes market intelligence from thousands of successful product launches and helps you avoid predictable mistakes.
This isn't about automation. It's about expertise multiplication.
Traditional Consulting Model:
Expert Knowledge → High-Paying Client → Exclusive Advantage
Democratized AI Model:
Expert Knowledge → AI Encoding → Distributed Access → Leveled Playing FieldThe key difference? Ownership and control.
In the rent-seeking model, the platform owns the AI, controls the knowledge, and extracts value from every interaction.
In the democratization model, the AI serves as infrastructure—like roads or power grids—that enables value creation rather than capturing it.
The Institutional Memory Revolution
One of the most compelling applications of agentic AI isn't replacing human judgment—it's preserving and distributing it.
Consider how much institutional knowledge gets lost every day:
- The veteran manager who retires without documenting their crisis management strategies
- The successful founder who sells their company without transferring their customer insight frameworks
- The expert consultant whose pattern recognition abilities disappear when they change careers
Traditional knowledge management systems capture documents, not decision-making capabilities. They store information, not intelligence.
But agentic AI could capture the actual reasoning patterns, the contextual judgments, the hard-won intuitions that make expertise valuable.
| Traditional Knowledge Systems | Agentic Knowledge Systems |
|---|---|
| Store documents | Encode decision frameworks |
| Archive information | Preserve reasoning patterns |
| Require human interpretation | Provide contextual guidance |
| Static repositories | Dynamic advisory capabilities |
This creates a different kind of value proposition: instead of making experts obsolete, it makes expertise abundant.
The Network Effects of Distributed Intelligence
Here's where it gets interesting.
When knowledge becomes more accessible, it doesn't just help individual businesses—it creates positive network effects across entire ecosystems.
Better-informed small businesses make better decisions. Better decisions create more successful outcomes. More successful outcomes generate new knowledge. New knowledge feeds back into the system.
The result isn't just individual improvement—it's collective intelligence that grows stronger over time.
Consider cross-border trade. Right now, most small businesses avoid international expansion because the complexity feels overwhelming. Different legal systems, cultural nuances, regulatory requirements, currency considerations.
But what if that complexity was manageable? What if the hard-won expertise of successful international businesses was accessible to everyone?
You wouldn't just get more cross-border trade. You'd get better cross-border trade. More thoughtful market entry strategies. More culturally aware product adaptations. More sustainable international relationships.
The whole ecosystem would become more intelligent.
Beyond Automation: AI as Cognitive Infrastructure
The most powerful applications of agentic AI won't replace human capabilities—they'll extend them.
Instead of AI agents that book your flights, imagine AI systems that help you make better strategic decisions about where to travel and why.
Instead of AI that writes your emails, imagine AI that helps you communicate more effectively by understanding cultural context, relationship dynamics, and optimal timing.
Instead of AI that manages your business while you sleep, imagine AI that makes you a better business owner by providing real-time access to relevant expertise, comparable case studies, and predictive insights.
This is AI as cognitive infrastructure rather than cognitive replacement.
The Path Forward: Building for Distribution, Not Extraction
The technology exists to build either version of agentic AI.
The rent-seeking platform that intermediates everything. Or the democratizing infrastructure that amplifies everyone.
The difference isn't technical—it's philosophical.
It's about whether we design AI systems to concentrate power or distribute it. Whether we build for extraction or creation. Whether we optimize for platform control or user empowerment.
The questions we should be asking:
- Who owns the AI agent's knowledge and decision-making capabilities?
- Can users take their data and insights with them if they leave the platform?
- Does the system become more valuable as it serves more users, or as it controls more interactions?
- Are we creating dependencies or capabilities?
The Real Revolution Isn't Automation—It's Democratization
Agentic AI will reshape how work gets done.
The question is whether it reshapes work toward greater concentration of power and extraction of value—or toward broader distribution of capability and creation of opportunity.
The difference matters.
Because the most transformative technologies aren't the ones that replace human capabilities—they're the ones that extend human potential.
And if we build agentic AI right, we won't just get more efficient businesses. We'll get more intelligent communities. More capable individuals. More resilient economic systems.
We'll get technology that actually serves human flourishing rather than just optimizing for platform metrics.
That's the agentic AI worth building.
What would you want your AI agent to make you better at, rather than replace you with?
