The Autonomous Economy: Why Billions of Agents & Robots Will Replace How the World Does Business

While everyone is busy talking about OpenClaw and Claude Code and the latest videos of robots doing tricks, what no one is talking about is that we're knocking on the door of billions of agents and billions of robots coming online and doing economic work end-to-end and transacting. We call this the autonomous economy, AE for short. Welcome back to the Agentic Podcast. I'm George Bandarian, your host. And general partner at Untapped Ventures. And in today's episode, I'm going to share our autonomous economy thesis unveiled to our LPs recently at our AGM, Annual General Meeting, in LA. For founders, the autonomous economy opens up an entirely new space to build new infrastructure, new applications, new workflow layers, and entirely new companies that couldn't have existed before. And for investors, it creates a new lens for understanding where outsized value will be built in the next decade. So at Untappd, this is more than a market we're watching. It's a thesis that's shaping how we think, what we study, and the kinds of founders we want to meet early on. You'll get to hear my full presentation with some LP reactions and Q&A. Should be a real thought-provoking session for our listeners. Let's go. Okay, so let's get into the new thesis. I felt that even for us, there was another step change that happened in the last few months, right? So if you're following, and you know, I know Alejandro with the, you know, what's happening with Cloud Cowork and Cloud Code and OpenAI Codex and OpenClaw. These tools have really taken things to the next level. And I just felt that it was important for us to pause and do thesis research and development to start the year. And we started that, but we were so busy, so I had to call a complete investment moratorium. So we stopped everything else and the whole team spent about a month just really looking at What's happened? What's shifted? How is the AI field evolving? Where is the next opportunity? Because from the beginning, what we want to do is we want to invest right where the puck is going, right? Where it's going to be, not where it is. So the result of that is what I'm going to present now. So the thesis is now around the autonomous economy, right? So this is where agents, digital agents on the computer and robots, physical robots, are able to execute work end-to-end that has value and also transact without any humans necessarily involved in the process. So what's interesting is we're moving from this old economy that's very human-centric, constrained by human biology and time and headcount, to the new economy, the autonomous economy that is really just constrained by the compute, the energy, the data for all these agents and robots to go do work for us and create value. We have 4 pillars of this autonomous economy that we've established. So everything from the autonomous intelligent agents, the robotics, the physical layer, then you have the secure economic infrastructure. So these are all the financial rails that are going to need to enable agents and robots transacting together, right, doing business without a human involved, exchange of money. And then the autonomous enterprise operations. How this all ultimately translates and reimagines business processes across the enterprise from HR to accounting to everything else you can imagine. It's gonna get adopted pretty quickly, right, on the enterprise side because if you look at the old process where there's all these bottlenecks on top in red and there's humans doing the steps, now you could have swarms of agents that are doing the job from lead gen and passing it to the next agent that does the sales qualification and passing it on. That's obviously a 24/7 process, doesn't call in sick, scales very nicely. And so I think it's helpful to look at some examples 'cause we're not quite there yet, but we're going to get there. But the clues are really that middle one, right? So we have the human in the loop. That's what we got used to, that these AI tools are for me. They're for me to sit down at my computer as an individual and for me to use a chatbot and for me to do something with it. Now we're very much on the human on the loop, right? So this is where I could delegate. I could sit down, Alejandro, how many Cloud Code Agents do you have open? 14. 14, how about you, Hamlet?

About 15 to 20.

15 to 20. So that's like, he has 14 employees, he has 15 to 20 employees. These are people that, you know, they're the humans on the loop. They're telling it, hey, I want this project done, and then the agents are going out and doing it. That's the phase we're in now. But you could just see where this is going, right? The writing's on the wall where it's going to get to the point where, of course, there's still going to be a business or an individual that's going to give the initial instructions. But from there on out, once it knows what the goals are, the agents and the robots are going to autonomously be able to do their work. So going from telling Claude Code to build a software to autonomous agents, understand the users, see how user behavior is changing. They write the software, they put it into a test, they test it, they roll it into production, and then they let the humans know, hey, I just rolled out version 7.2. This is what I added. I fully tested everything, right? Same thing you could imagine in the other areas as well. So I think it's really fascinating, this time that we're entering. And the data behind it is because you could see the data center growth that's taking place. You could see the CAGR of the agents market. That's not too far out. I mean, that's 2028. That's only in a couple years. And you could see how quickly agents are projected to grow. If we look at a few other charts, you could look at Gartner's hype cycle for 2025 and see that the first principles AI, AI governance platforms, and some of those other ones Some of what I'm talking about hasn't even made the Gartner lens yet. And that's really what we were looking for. The thing that I challenged the team with is if ChatGPT knows about it, if CB Insights or PitchBook has the category on a market map, then we're already too late, right? So we only want to invest in something that is not already a category on a market map, but ideally there's not even a market map for it. Right? And that's basically what we're talking about today. All of the numbers point that this is what's happening. And usually I play a lot more videos. This time I didn't have as many videos, but I think this is a good one. It really, really sinks the point home. Okay, so initially we're starting with autonomous robots in the warehouse. So this could be Amazon, Walmart, and other places. From there we're moving on to different kinds of autonomous cars and trucks. So whether it's tractors doing the farming, again, if you look closely, there's no human driving any of these. Autonomous farms, there's no farmer milking the cow. 3D printing, autonomously building a home without any developers. Well, the developers are involved, but no construction workers, I should say. There's a 3D-printed house in 24 hours. This is one of Otto's autonomous trucks. I'm a firm believer that we're not too far away from having a completely autonomous fleet on the road. Maybe 10 years tops, we won't be driving cars. This we already have, the employee— the no-employee Amazon stores, autonomous store. Drones delivering the last mile of your package straight to your house. Autonomous restaurant, go in, put your order in, makes all the food for you. No employees. Uh, robotic surgeries, more precise than the skilled doctors. This is where it gets good. If you look at this one, there was just one car and everybody else had horses in 1900 in New York. 13 years later, it was completely flipped. One horse and the rest were cars. So that's how quickly that happened in New York, and back then things moved slow. Some of the robot dogs from Boston Dynamics. So here is ultimately what it boils down to. This is our investment thesis if you put together everything I said. This is our AE, autonomous economy, value stack and where we want to invest going forward for the rest of Fund 1 and all of Fund 2. So at the bottom you have the intelligence and compute substrate. So this is everything that provides the intelligence, everything that's physical and/or the models. So everything sits there. Then you have all these kind of new layers. They're not looked at typically this way. What are we going to need in this new world? We're going to need the agent runtime and orchestration layer. All these new things that we don't have really to the scale that we need to have them— planning, tool calling, memory, workflow graphs, sandboxes. Then if we go up, we have the autonomy control plane, right? So how are we going to control and make sure that the brains of it, everything is working right? Identity, permissions, policy evaluations, audit, rollback, kill switch. These are the new rails that agents need to be able to play nicely with each other. Then you have the machine workforce layer, right? Now, all of a sudden, we had HR departments that you manage just your human employees. Now you have to manage all your robot employees, right? And so you have to procure them. You have to see, is he doing good? Is he doing bad? You have to know what their skills registry is. You have to manage the fleet. They're going to break down. They need to be serviced. And then on top of that, you have the autonomous experiences to the enterprise, right? So these are all the agentic apps. So to start to kind of sum up this section, so we're, we're really in the middle of this big paradigm shift in economic value creation. We're, we're going from the traditional economy to the autonomous economy. All the signs are there. You already see it with agents and you see it with all the robots, the announcements from Figure and Tesla with the humanoids. So what we've decided is we're no longer an AI native fund. We now invest in AE startups, autonomous economy. So let's fast forward. And if everything I'm saying happens the way that I'm saying it, we'll get to a place where we'll have, you know, billion or billions of agents and billion or billions of robots out there in the world. And so let's just imagine that it's there and imagine that an agent detects a supply chain issue out in the field. It finds, puts an ad out or whatever, contacts a bunch of robots. Gets a robot that says, "Yes, I'll go do it. It's in the area." The robot goes, takes care of it, fixes whatever needed to be fixed physically, lets the agent know, you know, the robot automatically takes a photo, submits whatever the proof is, and then the agent settles the payment all without a human being involved. That's what we're talking about, right? Just to kind of put all this in perspective. So the trillion-dollar question for us as investors is, when do you guys think this will happen? When will we hit like a billion on each? Anybody that was part of the last session, don't answer.

500 million.

1 billion. Hey, you were in the last session. You're cheating, Paul. Anyway, so to go back, we're going to get to the agents, billion-plus agents in 2028, in just a couple of years. And then this one was the one that I said 2040s, and a lot of you on our last call said it's going to be a lot sooner than that. You know, check your data. I mean, of course, if you ask Elon, it's going to be a lot sooner than that. So yeah, I don't want to go too much deeper. I think you get the point. The agents are going to be here in just a few years and the robots a few years after that. So right now we're going to focus more on the agents while doing the early infrastructure bets on the robots, because it's not that Figure and Tesla are going to win the whole thing. They're going to win at the hardware level. But there's going to be this infrastructure layer that's going to be necessary for enterprises to adopt it and for things to work properly. Okay, so for all my A360 friends, Peter has this very famous quote, "The best way to become a billionaire is to help a billion people." And now I have my own version. Right? Because that's the reality now. If you want to be a billionaire, you got to help a billion agents and robots. Well, okay, that's exciting, George Bandarian. But, and as investors, we like the sound of that and sounds like if we do good, we could make a lot of money. But what about all those humans, right? What's going to happen if 50 to some people say 80% of jobs are going to be completely replaceable within a few years? What's going to happen here? I think this is a good video from Vinod Khosla from Khosla Ventures. Somebody I look up to as someone really successful in this field. But let's hear what Vinod had to say about this.

How do you think is the best way to replace income when we have this huge wealth disparity?

Let's talk about that.

Yeah.

I think each country will do things differently. Starting in about 2030, 80%—

4 years away.

4 years away. 80% of all jobs, so two-thirds of all jobs, jobs will be capable of being done by an AI. But what happens when all labor is free? The abundance of goods and services will be very, very large. Prices will be very, very low. So I would suspect by 2040, $30,000 will buy— and maybe $10,000 will buy— much more than you can buy if you have a $100,000 income today. So the level of income you need in a deflationary economy will be very different.

Interesting. So you think it'll cost less for just lifestyle?

Look, all education should be free.

All—

which means colleges, goodbye?

It's a real question. It'll take longer because people like institutions and the notion of institutions. But you won't need a college to get an engineering degree. You won't even need the engineering degree except if your passion is learning. All healthcare, healthcare except interventional procedures like heart surgery will be near-free. Labor, whether you're talking about farm workers or assembly line workers or retail workers or accountants, they'll be all free.

This is a very important question, especially if you go back to the Mai and the funds massively transformative purpose, right? Which starts with Untappd being about helping humanity reach our untapped potential. The answer to that is that A, it's going to create all kinds of new jobs, right? So like I mentioned, a robot's going to break and you're going to have people that need to go fix it. You're going to have agent supervisors, you're going to have AI governance leads at companies, you're going to have automation auditors. So just like any other technological shift, it's going to create millions of new roles. That's one part of the answer. The other part of the answer is we don't know yet, but we'll figure it out. We've been through this before. We've seen this movie before when we went from everybody was a farmer to we had the industrial age to we went to services, and now we're entering here. So we'll figure it out. And I think that there's different solutions like UBI, right? Universal basic income. The governments have some responsibilities. Others have some responsibilities. But with that, I think I want to go to the feedback. So now I just want you to talk in your table. There's a lot of questions on here, but I think the biggest one, the question I want to have you do on your table is the following. When we talk about the autonomous economy and billions of agents and robots, how do you see that impacting you, your company, your industry, you know, your investments. And then let's put 5 minutes on the clock for you to share on your table real quick and then see what came up.

All right, go ahead.

But I think when you look at these agents and robots, anybody, the money part is going to be a real hard part. But I don't want some robot spending my money. How is that robot going to go into my checking account, take money out? Trust factor is a real sticky point. And people do not trust and thinking about hacks and forget— Is the money safe? Is their money safe? So we kind of talked about—

You're right. That's going to be probably the biggest problem. And I think that's why that right there, whoever solves that, that's a multi-trillion dollar company right there, right? Whoever enables that.

With blockchain, you don't give it access to a checking account. You just say like, hey, you're going to have $100 or $1,000 or whatever you want unlimited, and you can cap it and you can create like unlimited wallets programmatically. And then that way you could just generate like, imagine if you had like a team, you could just say, hey, I'm going to give you like 10 wallets with X amount of money so that you can actually spend it on these different things. And then you don't have to worry about your, you know, anything having access to your checking account and spending going out of control or credit.

And you're right on the individual, right? You guys are, I think both of you were talking on the personal level, but that like, that's not going to fly for a fortune 500s, right? So unless somebody comes up with that layer that meets enterprise security and compliance and governance and risk that allows that. But so that's the opportunity there, right? So if we find a startup that's doing what you said with the enterprise security, that sounds like that could be a big winner in the new economy. Al?

So I think one big assumption is that all these companies, all these enterprise companies are going to survive. And I think from a standpoint of the general sort of trend is we're rapidly moving from a scarcity-based economy to a more an abundance-based economy. So when people say, what are all these millions and hundreds of millions of people going to be doing? Because what do you do when your basic needs are just taken care of? Housing, food, energy. There's a bunch of stuff that are just going to be taken care of. Now, all of these agents and robots that are going to be created, we're going to go into an exponential phase. And yes, there is a big danger that we're going to end up in digital feudalism, which is like if you don't know how to engage with AI, you're in trouble. Right now, the question is all the companies that are what I call the empathetic types of businesses that are sitting there looking at this wave coming, and it's an inevitable wave. Like, there's absolutely no way you can get in front of it. And how do you create those bridges for the rest of the humans to walk across to leverage this coming capabilities.

Yeah, thank you, Al. And that was the key point that I forgot to make when I added that, like, what happens to all the humans that are employees point. I wasn't trying to say that it's negative that this is going to happen. Obviously, I'm personally very excited as a human and as an investor. I think the point of that is that not only that we'll figure it out, but I also think that that's going to present a tremendous opportunity. So while the majority of Fund 2 will be focused on investing in autonomous economy thesis companies, there's going to be some part of that that's going to be solving the problem of what happens to hundreds of millions of Americans that are going to be without jobs. Right. There's going to be really smart, innovative founders that are going to figure out what to do with that. And I think that's another, you know, couple of great outcomes there as well. So, yeah, I mean, obviously we're very excited about the autonomous economy thesis. We want to seize the moment to really be able to take advantage of the opportunity here. We already have in mind what we're going to do differently for AE, which is being very clear on where are the next generation of founders that are going to build at each of those 5 layers of the stack that I mentioned, where are they coming from? And so we have a pretty good idea depending on which layer of the stack and what problem they're solving, what are the likely companies that they're working at today, where are they likely getting their PhDs and in what? And so we'll refine our sourcing based on this, but I feel pretty good about that to focus on those personas and then be able to win and then just continue with our sourcing flywheel, right? Really have the community play a bigger impact on the inbound, do that research-based targeted, ideal client persona, ICP, or buyer persona outbound, have our portfolios provide more referrals, and then just rinse and repeat. So there you have it, the autonomous economy where billions of agents and billions of robots do work end to end and transact, and where the next trillion-dollar companies will be forged. So if this episode resonated with you, make sure to subscribe to the Gentec Podcast. So you don't miss future conversations with AE founders, investors, and operators building at the forefront of the shift. And if you're a founder already building in this space, especially at the pre-seed or seed stage, we'd love to hear from you. At Untapped Ventures, we're backing AE founders early on, writing million-dollar first checks and working closely with the companies building towards this future. You can learn more about Untapped Ventures, explore our thesis and pitch us at www.untapped.ventures. And if you found this episode valuable, please share it with a fellow founder, investor, or operator who's thinking deeply about where the autonomous economy is headed. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode.