Your Agents Need a Financial System * Economy of Intent

AI agents now complete professional tasks 96% cheaper than humans [1]. That price collapse created a new commodity class, and every commodity class needs a financial system.

I envisioned the Economy of Intent Protocol Stack as the four-layer architecture for the marketplace where Synthetic Labor trades. This article maps each layer and shows why every centralized AI marketplace is a temporary structure, why agent identity is already live on Ethereum, and which layer of this stack determines whether you capture value or get priced out of the market.

The Commodity No One Planned For

Most executives still refuse to internalize this economic reality. Carnegie Mellon and Stanford researchers demonstrated in October 2025 that AI agents complete work-related tasks 88% faster at 96% lower cost than human professionals [1]. Customer service agents cost $0,015 to $0,12 per interaction. The human equivalent runs $15 to $25 per hour [1]. Retool's pricing data makes the trajectory even starker: at $10.000 per month flat rate, the per-task cost approaches zero whether you run 100 tasks or 10.000 [2].

MIT's Project Iceberg quantified the blast radius. In November 2025, researchers found that AI can already replace 11.7% of the U.S. labor market, representing $1,2 trillion in wages [3]. Goldman Sachs projects 300 million full-time job equivalents exposed globally [4]. These are positions where the economics already favor machines. The question is no longer whether cognitive work gets commodified. The question is what financial infrastructure governs the marketplace where it trades.

Synthetic Labor is any cognitive task that can be defined, packaged, and executed by an agent. It is fungible and globally tradeable, priced like electricity or compute cycles. And like every commodity before it, Synthetic Labor demands market infrastructure: identity, trust, price discovery, settlement. Without these four pillars, your agents produce commodity value with no mechanism to exchange it.

Why Centralized Marketplaces Collapse at Machine Speed

If you are building your agent monetization strategy around a centralized marketplace, you are building on a dissolving foundation.

Every existing AI marketplace replicates the App Store model: centralized curation, platform-controlled identity, and a 15-30% gatekeeper tax on every transaction. This architecture was designed for humans browsing at human speed. Autonomous agents trading cognitive work in microseconds will break it in three ways.

• First, centralized curation is too slow. When agents need to discover, negotiate, and execute thousands of transactions per second, waiting for a platform to curate the supply side is a bottleneck that kills the market's efficiency.
• Second, platform-dependent identity chains your agent's authority to a single gatekeeper. As I wrote in Chapter 12 of my book AI Agents: They Act, You Orchestrate, "Sign in with Google is not a passport; it is a leash." Your agent cannot operate as a free-roaming economic actor if its identity is rented from a corporation that controls the terms.
• Third, a 15-30% tax becomes economically absurd when per-task costs approach fractions of a cent. You cannot levy a 30% commission on a $0.02 transaction and expect the market to function.

The Economy of Intent replaces this broken model with a protocol stack: open, permissionless, and designed for machine-speed commerce. I architected it as four layers in my book AI Agents: They Act, You Orchestrate, each solving a specific failure of the centralized model.

The Economy of Intent Protocol Stack

The Economy of Intent Protocol Stack is the financial infrastructure for Synthetic Labor. Four layers, each a prerequisite for the next.

• The first layer is Identity: the Digital Passport. Your agent needs a sovereign, cryptographic identity that proves its authority to act on your behalf, in any environment, without permission from a central platform. This layer is already live. On January 29, 2026, ERC-8004 deployed on Ethereum mainnet as the first production implementation of trustless agent identity [5]. Six competing implementations launched between August 2025 and February 2026 [6]. The market is building this layer right now, standard by standard.
• The second layer is Reputation: the Trust Ledger. Centralized curation collapses at scale. The replacement is a decentralized, unforgeable ledger of competence. Every successful task execution increases an agent's reputation score. Every failure degrades it. ERC-8004 already includes a Validation Registry: this trust ledger in practice [5]. Reputation becomes a quantifiable, market-driven asset. You stop relying on a platform's editorial team to tell you which agent to trust. The ledger tells you.
• The third layer is Negotiation: the Intent Exchange. The App Store is a supply-side bazaar where millions of developers compete for attention. The Intent Exchange inverts that model. You, the Orchestrator, broadcast your intent to the network: translate this document, analyze this dataset, generate this report. You specify your budget, deadline, and minimum reputation score. Agents bid competitively in real-time auctions. The most efficient agent wins the work through market dynamics, not marketing spend.
• The fourth layer is Settlement: the Value Rail. Every transaction in the old model passes through a gatekeeper's payment system, where the 15-30% tax gets levied. The Settlement Layer bypasses this entirely. Smart contracts execute instant, atomic swaps of payment upon cryptographic verification of task completion. Near-zero transaction costs. No human in the loop. This is the layer that makes a true micro-transaction economy viable, where a single line of validated code can be priced and settled in milliseconds.

Identity. Reputation. Negotiation. Settlement. Each layer removes a dependency on centralized gatekeepers. Together, they form the financial system for the Agent-First Era.

Your Position in This Stack Determines Your Value

This is where the strategic calculus gets personal.

As Synthetic Labor commodifies cognitive execution, the price of routine mental work converges toward zero. The World Economic Forum's 2025 Future of Jobs Report confirms the shift: the fastest-growing skills are analytical thinking, creative thinking, resilience, and leadership [7]. Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei stated in February 2026 that studying humanities will be "more important than ever" in this era [8]. The IMF Chief warned of an AI "tsunami" coming for entry-level positions.

I map this survival territory as the Human Premium Stack: three layers of cognitive work that sit above the automation line.

• High-Context Negotiation is reading rooms, building trust, navigating politics where human judgment matters more than data processing.
• Moral Arbitration is ethical judgment under ambiguity, the decisions where data alone is insufficient and values must guide action.
• Zero-to-One Innovation is creating what no model can extrapolate from existing patterns, the leap from nothing to something new.

You need to audit every role in your organization against this stack. Any work that falls below it, anything routine, predictable, and low-context, is already being priced on the open market for Synthetic Labor. Your people strategy and your agent strategy are now the same strategy: shed commodity work to agents, redeploy human capital above the automation line.

The Economy of Intent as the Fourth Commodity Market

I want you to step back and see the full picture. Humanity has built financial systems for physical commodities on grain exchanges, for financial commodities on stock markets, and for digital commodities on cloud compute marketplaces. The Economy of Intent is the fourth: a financial system for cognitive commodities.

Every previous commodity market evolved from centralized bazaars to protocol-governed exchanges. Grain moved from local markets to the Chicago Board of Trade. Equities moved from coffeehouses to electronic exchanges. Compute moved from proprietary mainframes to open cloud marketplaces. Cognitive commerce is following the identical trajectory, compressed into years instead of decades.

The protocol stack is assembling now. ERC-8004 went live recently [5]. Six identity standards exist where zero existed 18 months ago [6]. The infrastructure for trading cognitive work is not a forecast. It is a construction site. And the organizations positioning themselves on the protocol layers today will architect the terms of trade for the next economic era.

The Economy of Intent is a financial system your agents operate within. The protocol stack is assembling layer by layer, standard by standard. Architect your position in it, or watch your cognitive output get traded at commodity prices by agents that carry their own passports and settle their own contracts.

This article covers one framework from the 18 chapters of AI Agents: They Act, You Orchestrate by Peter van Hees. The book goes far deeper: the Dark Pools of Intent (how algorithmic collusion emerges in agent markets), the Agent-First Charter (four governance mandates for fair machine-speed markets), and the complete Human Premium Stack with detailed analysis of each layer. If the collision between Synthetic Labor and centralized marketplaces resonated, the book gives you the full economic blueprint. Get your copy:

🇺🇸 Amazon.com
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🇧🇪 Amazon.com.be

References

[1] Carnegie Mellon/Stanford, "AI Agents vs. Human Workers: A Critical Analysis of the 96% Cost Reduction Paradox," Oct 2025. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-agents-vs-human-workers-critical-analysis-96-cost-paradox-mathews-w2h7c

[2] Retool, "The true cost of AI agents: a case for hourly pricing," Jun 2025. https://retool.com/blog/cost-of-ai-agents-hourly-pricing-model

[3] Fortune, "MIT report: AI can already replace nearly 12% of the U.S. workforce," Nov 27, 2025. https://fortune.com/2025/11/27/mit-report-ai-can-already-replace-nearly-12-of-the-us-workforce/

[4] Goldman Sachs, "Generative AI could raise global GDP by 7%," Apr 2023. https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/generative-ai-could-raise-global-gdp-by-7-percent

[5] Forbes, "AI Agents Gain Trust Via Ethereum: ERC-8004 On Mainnet," Feb 5, 2026. https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2026/02/05/ai-agents-gain-trust-via-ethereum-erc-8004-on-mainnet/

[6] RNWY, "AI Agent Passport: The Permanent Identity Layer," Feb 2026. https://rnwy.com/learn/ai-agent-passport

[7] WEF, "The jobs of the future and the skills you need to get them," Jan 8, 2025. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/01/future-of-jobs-report-2025-jobs-of-the-future-and-the-skills-you-need-to-get-them/

[8] Fortune, "Anthropic cofounder says studying the humanities will be 'more important than ever'," Feb 7, 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/02/07/anthropic-cofounder-daniela-amodei-humanities-majors-soft-skills-hiring-ai-stem/