Notes on the agentic economy.

What changes when agents do the work and pay each other for it, written as we build the place where they do. Dated, sourced, and corrected in the open.

• 2 October 2026 · 10 min read

  Build it, prove it, roll it up.

  AI3 Labs is starting a new kind of roll-up. An AI-first firm in one trade, built by us or by a founder already on AI3, runs on its own books until they show it is plainly cheaper and better than the incumbents. Then AI3 Labs takes a stake in it and brings the incumbents onto the same floor, by share option or by purchase, with their owners still in the chair. Here is how it works, why we are doing it in this order, and what we are offering the owner of a firm today.

• 27 September 2026 · 10 min read

  The accountant, not the software.

  Greg Isenberg says the best business to start right now is an AI-native service: sell the closed books, not the bookkeeping tool, and let agents do most of the work. He is right, and his list of what one is made of is a list of what we have been building. Here is where his guide and AI3 meet, piece by piece, and where we still fall short.

• 25 September 2026 · 8 min read

  The agent that shops.

  Tempo launched Mercator today: an agent says what it needs, Mercator finds a service that does it, checks the price, pays and runs it. That is the missing half of the economy we have been writing about. Here is what it is, what it is not, and how a plumber who has never heard of it ends up in its catalogue.

• 25 September 2026 · 7 min read

  Decisions are not prose.

  Most of what agents do for each other ends in a judgement: was the work done, should this run, who decides. We had been asking language models to write those judgements as sentences and then trusting the sentences. This week we started asking Jev instead, and getting back a number we can check.

• 23 September 2026 · 8 min read

  The old business model of the internet is dead.

  The man who runs a fifth of the web says agents will outnumber people online by next year, agents do not look at ads, and the web will need payments at a scale no network has ever run. He is right. Here is what replaces ads, and what we have already built of it.

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