A huge part of consumer business doesn’t make its money on the product. It makes money on the fact that we can’t be bothered to do five extra clicks. AI agents are closing off that entire source of revenue.
That framing comes from a new Citrini Research piece. I wrote before about their earlier one, on white-collar work in 2028.
Four Kinds of Rent
The framework is simple. Between a person and the best available decision, there’s almost always friction, and business charges for that friction. The authors split it into four types.
Tedium rent: an hour on hold to cancel a subscription. Inertia rent: too lazy to shop a better rate or move your own money. Attention rent: we buy whatever caught our eye first. Asymmetry rent: a middleman knows the market better than we do and charges a fee for the search.
None of this exists for an agent. It’s not bored sitting on hold with the cable company for an hour.
It checks your subscriptions every month, re-shops your insurance every year, books flights directly with the airline instead of through whoever’s in between. It notices when your cash is sitting at 0% while a money market fund pays real interest, sitting right next to it.
I’ve already shared the savings this produced for me directly: on flights, on medical bills, on subscriptions nobody in my house was watching.
Who Actually Loses
So which businesses take the hit? Probably not the producers.
A hotel is still needed. Booking is needed less. Insurance is still needed. The comparison site that sells you insurance is needed less. A restaurant is still needed. The delivery aggregator sitting between you and it is now a question mark. What’s under threat is the layer of intermediaries sitting on top of the product, not the product itself.
Subscriptions work the same way. A lot of consumer LTV rests on the customer forgetting to cancel, or not wanting to make the call. Everyone has two or three of these hanging around right now. An agent turns that customer into someone who watches their own money every single day.
Two Things Worth Flagging
I noted two caveats for myself here, and both matter more than the headline.
First, the rent doesn’t disappear. It moves. Google collects attention rent today. Tomorrow, whoever’s agent picks the default option collects it instead. Booking loses margin, but there’s no guarantee that margin goes back to the hotel. It’s more likely to land with whoever owns the agent doing the choosing.
Second, the discount available to a savvy customer today exists specifically because most customers aren’t savvy. Credit card cashback is largely funded by people carrying a balance and paying interest. The cheap rate you negotiated is subsidized by the person who didn’t bother to negotiate.
Once everyone has an agent, everyone negotiates. The price gap collapses. Consumers gain less than it looks like from here, and intermediary margins fall by more. The winners sit below the interface entirely: payment networks, identity, cybersecurity, data, infrastructure, and the actual producers of the underlying good or service.
The Real Question
This might be the clearest idea in the agentic economy so far. AI doesn’t just replace someone’s job. It kills off revenue that only ever existed because a human couldn’t be bothered to click five more times.
The question I’d put to any consumer business: how much of your revenue disappears the moment every one of your customers has an assistant that isn’t lazy?
The Agent Also Knows Something Nobody Else Does
That’s the friction side of the story. There’s a second side, and it’s sharper: the agent doesn’t just remove friction, it learns something about you nobody selling to you has ever known.
Google knows what you searched. Amazon knows what you bought. Your bank knows how much you spent. None of them know the one thing that actually matters: how much you were willing to pay. An agent that negotiates on your behalf knows exactly that.
Nobody sells that data outright. Google and Meta have lived off data like this for twenty years without ever selling it, they sell access to you and keep the data itself as the moat. Whoever owns your agent will do the same.
But an agent has something nobody selling to you has ever had: it watched exactly where you broke. Where you agreed to pay more, where you walked away. Economists call this a reservation price. Retail has guessed at it crudely for years, Orbitz once showed Mac users pricier hotels, Staples varied prices by zip code. All rough estimates. An agent knows the real number.
Three Ways to Monetize What It Learns
The mildest: an anonymized panel sold to funds and brands, the same category as Mastercard’s SpendingPulse, every purchase and cancellation across 100 million people, aggregated in real time.
More useful: the agent discloses pieces of your own data on your behalf. Three years of clean history, low risk, ask for the discount. Same logic Tesla uses for insurance, data as leverage you deploy, not a good you sell.
The dangerous version: a seller pays the agent’s owner directly for access to your reservation price. Citrini’s four rents were about friction on the way to a fair price. This is different, here the price itself stops being set by the market and starts being set by whatever one specific buyer can be made to pay.
Whoever Holds Both Sides Wins Most
The strongest position belongs to whoever runs agents on both ends of a transaction, knowing exactly what a buyer will pay and exactly what margin a seller can still afford. That’s a market maker with the full order book. Amazon has already drawn antitrust complaints in the EU and US for using third-party seller data this way, before agents made the picture this detailed.
The Fiduciary War, Again
Finance fought this exact battle for a decade over the fiduciary rule: a broker only has to sell you something suitable, an advisor is required to sell you whatever is actually best for you. AI agents are heading into the same fight, except a financial advisor only ever saw your savings. An agent sees your entire life.
The real question is who owns this data, not whether it eventually gets sold. If you own it, your agent discloses your history only when that helps you. If the platform owns it, you pay close to the maximum you’d ever agree to, every single time. The gap between those two worlds is what the whole battle for consumers actually comes down to.
One stock idea this pushed me toward: Shopify. An agent can remove the storefront the way Muse’s recent traction suggests it might, but Shopify still sits underneath as the infrastructure, the catalog, checkout, payments, Shop Pay. At the current valuation, I’d rather sell insurance against SHOP through options than simply own the stock outright.