None of this is guaranteed to work well, or work at all, of course. It is up to us to decide if such AI agent markets ought to be created, how they should be safeguarded and regulated, and how to ensure that everyone can benefit from the economic value created by future advanced AI agents.

While it is tempting to think about major societal challenges like sustainability, climate change, or human well-being more broadly, it may well be more feasible to realize these concepts at the community scale.

If we intentionally design these virtual markets to support persistent agent identities, verifiable transactions and action outcomes, reputation, smart contracts between agents, and currencies and mechanisms that can capture positive social outcomes, this may open new possibilities.

Counter-intuitively, it may well be easier to coordinate AI agents at scale, than it is to coordinate people.

This is by no means a new idea - similar proposals have been directed at the human economy in the past. Yet, it is interesting to reassess its utility in the context of advanced AI agents in particular.

This is contingent on the underlying infrastructure being in place - fairly distributed bidding budgets, safety and governance mechanisms, verifiable and auditable transactions, oversight, and others.

Markets offer unique opportunities for steering these interactions towards favourable outcomes - and hopefully future research can make some of these conceptual ideas more concrete.

The reason why this may be of interest - is that we need to move beyond aligning single agents to instructions in isolation, and recognize the complex arising web of interactions in multi-agent systems at scale.

AI agents could thereby engage in auctions towards shared but otherwise limited resources, and the market mechanisms could help establish a fair allocation of goods.

This would be one of the emerging possibilities within Virtual Agent Economies imagined as steerable agent markets, somewhat analogous to High-Frequency Trading in the existing human economy.

Finally, we outline the technical and governance infrastructure—such as verifiable credentials for establishing trust—required to safely and robustly scale agentic AI deployments. These are necessary to address systemic market risks, and prevent exacerbating inequalities.

We can therefore think about orchestrating AI agent interactions towards achieving major societal or community goals, or better aligning with user preferences. Market-based mechanisms like auctions may also be employed for fair resource allocation when accessing shared goods.

The arising virtual (sandbox) AI agent economy may offer us new opportunities for insulation and safeguarding, as well as establishing potentially unprecedented coordination between AI agents.

The rapid adoption of AI agents points to a future where AI agents may be able to produce economic value independently of human labor. Coupled with the development of new interoperability standards like the A2A and MCP, this signals the inevitable emergence of a new economic layer.

Please feel free to reach out to me in case you're interested, and I can forward the applications along to our recruiting team for further evaluation.

Ideally, the candidates would have already applied through the SR posting - but if you are not already in the pipeline, this can be accommodated.