David Pawlan: A Layer for Agent Interactions Will Emerge on the Internet
David Pawlan, creator of Assistant Benchmark, stated on the Andreessen Horowitz podcast that after the internet, there will be infrastructure and products specifically for interactions between agents; services will evolve from person-to-person bookings and agent-to-person bookings to agent-to-agent bookings, rewriting the entire service industry.
General Partner Anish Acharya first proposed that infrastructure and products specifically for agent interactions, which do not exist today, will emerge. Pawlan added forms such as agent email and agent phone numbers, and questioned how the service industry will define itself when "there are no direct orders from people." He outlined the sequence: first the internet, then cybersecurity, first agents, then security components for agents, and questioned what industries that would spawn. The conclusion is that there are enough niche problems for a batch of startups to build a new layer of digital connections.
This judgment comes from the same 51-minute discussion, where Pawlan tested booking tickets and finding restaurants using unified prompts. Agent interactions mean that merchant interfaces need to change from pages that serve people to machine-readable channels that provide software credentials, limits, and audits. Email and phone numbers are considered legitimate identities for agents, rather than one-time conversations in a chat window. Security is singled out as a new industry, addressing issues like unauthorized orders, impersonating merchants, and collusion between agents to lock inventory.
On the same day, the enterprise side has already integrated agents into market shelves and cloud environments; this speech pushed the next step from "clicking buttons for people" to "two pieces of software settling accounts with each other." No new evaluation champions or funding amounts were announced, only predictions about industry structure.
In market mechanisms, what is bought is the yet-to-exist agent identity and interaction protocols, while what is sold is the expectation that the intermediary layer of the service industry will be rewritten. The funding narrative points to startups in identity, payments, inventory, and security, rather than creating another chat assistant; beneficiaries are platforms that can issue agent credentials, while those under pressure are booking phones and web forms that only serve human clicks. The event driver is podcast snippets, not standard releases.
In person-to-person service industries, charges are based on seats, while agent-to-agent charges are based on interfaces and success rates. Once emails and phone numbers are given to software, the cost of impersonation decreases, and the security industry can then have independent billing.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Pawlan translates the failure to book flights in consumer agent evaluations into the necessity of building another layer of the network. Existing internet pages, verification codes, and customer service numbers are designed for fingers, and agents can only simulate humans, incurring daily operational costs of about $20. If an interaction layer emerges, booking rooms, seats, and changing reservations will become credential-to-credential transactions, with humans exiting the loop. Anish confirms using investor syntax: this is a new product category, not just a feature switch for old apps. The analogy for security is quite rigid: the internet first connects and then adds firewalls, while agents will first place orders and then add authentication, with the wound period being the entrepreneurial window.
The capital path is to first establish identity and then conduct transactions. Agent emails and numbers correspond to domain systems, followed by directories, reputations, and settlements. Shopify opening doors to agents and Amazon closing doors to certain assistants are early political moves in the interaction layer: who allows machine customers into stores. a16z releasing the snippets separately is soliciting track names for the next batch of seed projects: agent security, agent settlement, agent customer service. Human agents in the service industry will leave exceptions for handling, while routine bookings will be negotiated by two pieces of software.
The analogs are electronic data interchange entering retail, the API economy entering travel, and the emergence of protocols for robot exclusion before the open network. The industry phase is personal agents moving from executing tasks for people to discovering each other. Without interaction standards, each assistant must log in to each merchant separately, limiting scalability; with standards, evaluations will shift from "can it book tickets" to "can it be trusted by other agents."
The structural judgment is industry chain reconstruction. The mechanism is that the counterparty in service transactions shifts from natural persons to software identities with limits, making intermediary pages and call centers optional. Reconstruction occurs because the marginal cost of simulating human clicks exceeds that of directly opening interfaces. Whoever issues agent identities and audits interactions will collect a new layer of tolls.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
First, there are mutual orders, then there will be an industry specifically to prevent them.
Give software a phone number, and the service industry must change its reception targets.
Pages designed for humans will ultimately become the detour costs for agents.