The Agentic AI Wave Is Coming
AI is evolving from chatbots to agents — autonomous systems that can plan, execute multi-step tasks, use tools, and interact with the world. The shift from conversational AI to agentic AI will be the most consequential technology transition since mobile. And crypto infrastructure is uniquely positioned to serve it.
The Agentic AI Wave Is Coming
The AI industry is undergoing a subtle but profound shift. The first wave of AI products — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini — were conversational: you ask a question, the model answers. The next wave will be agentic: you define a goal, and the AI plans and executes the steps to achieve it.
The difference is not just technical. It is economic. A conversational AI saves you time on individual tasks. An agentic AI performs entire workflows autonomously — researching, analysing, deciding, and acting without human intervention at each step. The productivity implications are an order of magnitude larger.
What Agentic AI Looks Like
An agentic AI system does not just generate text. It uses tools — browsing the web, querying databases, writing and executing code, interacting with APIs, and managing files. It plans — breaking complex goals into sub-tasks and executing them in sequence. It reasons about its own progress — evaluating whether its actions are moving toward the goal and adjusting its approach when they are not.
The early implementations are already impressive. AI agents that can conduct research across multiple sources and synthesise findings into a report. Agents that can write, test, and deploy code. Agents that can manage email, schedule meetings, and draft communications. And agents that can execute multi-step financial analysis — pulling data, building models, running scenarios, and presenting conclusions.
Why Crypto Matters for Agents
The agentic AI wave creates specific infrastructure needs that crypto is uniquely positioned to serve.
Payments. Agents that interact with services need to pay for them. Traditional payment infrastructure — designed for humans with bank accounts and credit cards — is poorly suited for autonomous systems that need to make thousands of micro-transactions per day. Crypto's programmable, permissionless payment rails are the natural fit.
Identity and authorisation. Agents that act on behalf of humans need verifiable credentials and spending limits. Blockchain-based identity systems can provide cryptographically verifiable authorisation that agents can present to services — without exposing the human's personal information.
Coordination. Multiple agents working together need coordination mechanisms — ways to negotiate, transact, and verify each other's work. Smart contracts provide programmable coordination infrastructure that can enforce agreements between agents without trusted intermediaries.
Marketplaces. As agents become more capable, markets for agent services will emerge — agents hiring other agents for specialised tasks. These marketplaces will need settlement infrastructure, reputation systems, and dispute resolution mechanisms. All of these can be built on blockchain infrastructure.
My View
The agentic AI wave will be the most important technology transition since mobile computing. It will transform how work is done across every industry — not by replacing humans, but by delegating routine cognitive work to autonomous systems that operate at machine speed and machine scale.
Crypto's role in this transition is not guaranteed. Traditional payment companies and cloud platforms will compete to serve the agentic economy. But crypto's properties — programmability, permissionlessness, composability, and 24/7 availability — give it a structural advantage for machine-to-machine transactions that traditional infrastructure was not designed to handle.
The builders who understand both AI and crypto — who can build the payment rails, identity systems, and coordination mechanisms that agentic AI requires — will create some of the most valuable infrastructure of the next decade.
The first wave of AI was conversational. The next wave is agentic. And the infrastructure that serves agentic AI — payments, identity, coordination — will be built on crypto rails. Not because crypto is trendy, but because it is the only infrastructure designed for machines rather than humans.