AI Agents Became a Product Category, With Caveats
Retrospectives disagree about the agent boom. Product launches are visible; reliable deployment and comparable adoption measures remain harder to establish.
THE UAF INDEX
Business
Who Profits When the Machines Take Over the Work? Tracing Value in the Age of Software Delegation
Who captures value when software takes on more work? The evidence points to data, workflow knowledge, and human accountability, while leaving the distribution of profits unsettled.
The Agent Can Act. Who Answers for It?
Economic participation raises a harder question than task completion: whose preferences guide the agent, and what happens when its choices go wrong?
Before You Count the Agents, Define the Job.
Forecasts of machine-heavy workforces mix robots, software agents and hiring plans. Counting them is easier than establishing what their numbers mean.
A Trillion Dollars Is a Forecast. Show Us the Receipts.
Autonomy’s biggest numbers mix future revenue, company valuations and social benefits. Add them carelessly and the economy grows before a single extra ride is sold.
An AI Shopkeeper Is Not Yet an Institution
Project Vend tested delegated business decisions. Research on agent oversight shows why granting work and establishing durable governance remain different questions.
Persistent Agents, Unsettled Economics
OpenClaw’s January 2026 introduction makes a user-hosted persistence case; its cost and scale remain unverified.
When Software Delegates Work, Who Holds Authority?
Project Vend and multi-agent protocols show task delegation and orchestration. They do not establish that agents are employees, legal principals, or autonomous businesses.
Claude Ran the Shop. Humans Still Restocked It.
Anthropic describes an AI shopkeeping experiment and a multi-agent research system. Google proposes a protocol for agents to work together. Human intervention remains part of the shopkeeping trial.
Your AI wants to shop. Whose card is that?
Visa and Mastercard describe agents purchasing on behalf of consumers and businesses. Their announcements are a payment roadmap, not a stack of completed transaction receipts.