AI could spark Cambrian explosion of startups

By Jorn Lambert

The next startup boom may begin in bedrooms, not boardrooms.

In the past, starting a business required more than an idea. Entrepreneurs needed capital, an office, servers and a team. Agentic AI could change that equation.

With agents, someone with an idea could potentially stay in a bedroom and build a team of agents to turn that idea into a business. The biggest shift may therefore be not that existing companies become more productive, but that more ordinary people gain the ability to become entrepreneurs. That could bring about what might be called a "Cambrian explosion of entrepreneurship".

But that promise comes with a choice. If AI ultimately makes large companies bigger and richer, then something important will have been missed.

The real opportunity is to make entrepreneurship more inclusive: to allow more people to build businesses on shared platforms and infrastructure, and to buy and sell goods and services around the world.

For that to happen, however, commerce itself must change. Today's payment systems were designed around human participation. In an agent economy, a person may simply tell an agent to buy a train ticket, while the agent handles the transaction. The system must then answer questions that were once much simpler: Is this really the person who gave the instruction? Is the agent legitimate? What exactly did the consumer mean by "tomorrow evening"?

This is where "verifiable intent" becomes important. A transaction should preserve what the consumer actually intended, so that when something goes wrong, it is possible to trace the problem: Did the agent make a mistake? Did the merchant? Or was the original instruction unclear?

Twenty-five years ago, consumers had to learn to trust online payments.

Today, that trust is largely taken for granted because standards, protections and mechanisms for redress have made digital commerce feel safe.

Agentic commerce will require a similar effort. Authentication, Know Your Agent, verifiable intent and clear rules can turn machine-driven transactions into trusted commerce.

The biggest opportunity in the agent economy may therefore be measured not by how powerful the technology becomes, but by how many new entrepreneurs it enables.

AI can lower the barriers to starting a business. Trusted infrastructure can give those businesses a way to reach the world.

Jorn Lambert is the chief product officer at Mastercard. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.