The Last Days of Marketplaces

AI agents are changing how we buy things. Companies should start preparing for a world where their customers are no longer humans.

There was a time when finding something on the internet was hard. Not because there weren't enough options, but because there were too many.

Imagine looking for a hotel, ordering food, or buying a product years ago. You would have to visit multiple websites, compare prices, read descriptions, and spend a considerable amount of time deciding which option was best for you.

Marketplaces solved that problem.

Companies like Amazon, Airbnb, and Uber created a place where buyers could find different offerings, compare them, and decide without navigating the entire internet.

It was a brilliant business model. They centralized and organized information, making the buying process easier. In exchange, they charged a fee for connecting buyers and sellers.

And for many years, that was a great value proposition.

But I think that's about to change.

The customer is no longer human

We are entering an era where AI agents will increasingly make buying decisions on our behalf.

Think about it. Why would you spend thirty minutes comparing hotels when you could simply ask your agent to find the best option for your next trip?

The agent could search hundreds of websites, compare thousands of data points, consider your preferences, evaluate prices, and come back with a recommendation.

It doesn't need to remember a particular website. It doesn't get overwhelmed by the number of options. And it doesn't need a marketplace to organize the information.

Marketplaces became valuable because humans have limited time and limited capacity to process information.

Agents change that equation.

And I would argue that agents will eventually become better buyers than humans.

When we buy something, we are influenced by emotions, advertising, brands, and personal experiences. We often choose something because we recognize the name or because someone convinced us it was better.

An agent can approach the same decision differently. It can evaluate more information, compare characteristics objectively, and recommend what matters to us.

Of course, agents will have their own incentives. Some will be supported by advertising, while others will be paid directly by users. Just as we have subscription services with and without advertising today, I expect both models to coexist.

But regardless of the business model, the fundamental change remains: the person making the buying decision is no longer a person.

And that changes everything.

The marketplace is losing its advantage

One could argue that marketplaces offer more than discovery. They provide trust, reviews, payment processing, customer service, and dispute resolution.

That's true.

But none of those capabilities are exclusive to marketplaces.

In regulated industries, for example, companies already operate under requirements established by governments and other authorities. An agent can verify licenses, certifications, operating history, and other information without relying on a marketplace.

Even reviews, one of the most valuable assets marketplaces have accumulated, are not necessarily reliable. Reviews can be manipulated, and the platforms controlling them have their own commercial incentives.

An agent could evaluate information from multiple independent sources instead of relying on a single company's reputation system.

More importantly, many businesses already have the infrastructure required to sell directly.

Take restaurants as an example.

A marketplace like Uber Eats or Rappi offers a complete solution. It provides discovery, ordering, payment processing, and delivery logistics.

For a small restaurant that doesn't want to build or operate any of those capabilities, that makes perfect sense. The marketplace is effectively renting them an entire operation.

But what about a restaurant chain that already has its own website, payment processing, delivery operation, and customer service?

Why should that company continue paying a significant percentage of every transaction to an intermediary?

Today, the answer is often customer acquisition. The marketplace controls access to customers.

But if customers begin using agents to discover and buy products, that advantage becomes much less defensible.

The agent can find the restaurant directly, compare its offering, and place an order without going through the marketplace.

The restaurant gets the order, owns the customer relationship, and avoids the marketplace's intermediation fee.

That's a much better proposition for companies capable of operating their own process.

We are changing the middleman

This is not the first time technology has changed how we discover businesses.

For decades, the Yellow Pages were one of the most important ways to find products and services. If you needed a plumber, a restaurant, or a local business, you opened a directory.

Then the internet arrived.

Yahoo organized websites into directories, making it easier to navigate an increasingly large amount of information.

Later, Google offered a better way to find what you were looking for without manually navigating those directories.

Each generation made the previous discovery model less valuable.

But the transition wasn't immediate.

The Yellow Pages continued operating long after the internet became popular. Yahoo continued attracting users after Google became dominant. Even today, older ways of finding information still exist.

I expect marketplaces to follow a similar path.

They won't disappear tomorrow. There will always be businesses that prefer outsourcing their sales operation and customers who continue using familiar platforms.

But the direction seems clear to me.

We are moving from marketplaces designed for humans to a new generation of intermediaries designed around AI agents.

And perhaps the most interesting part is that we are not eliminating the middleman. We are replacing it (again).

The agent provider may become the new gatekeeper. It may eventually charge fees, influence recommendations, or create new dependencies.

But that doesn't change the opportunity for businesses.

The previous middleman needed companies to participate in its marketplace. The new one can potentially discover and interact with businesses directly across the internet.

That's a fundamental difference.

Build your own capabilities

If I were running a company that depends heavily on marketplaces, I wouldn't recommend leaving them.

That would be a mistake.

Marketplaces still generate sales, provide infrastructure, and connect businesses with millions of customers (while taking a big cut of your revenue).

But I would start building an alternative today.

Your own online store. Your own payment processing. Your own customer database. Your own CRM. Your own operational processes.

And, most importantly, make your products and services accessible to agents.

That means having structured, accurate, and publicly accessible information about your offerings, prices, availability, and characteristics. Eventually, it also means allowing agents to interact directly with your systems to complete transactions.

This isn't necessarily about replacing your current distribution channels. It's about preparing for a different way of buying.

I see it as a side bet.

You can continue benefiting from marketplaces while developing the capabilities to operate independently.

And if agents become the primary way people discover and purchase products, you'll be ready.

Companies that don't prepare may end up paying intermediaries for access to customers they could reach directly.

The next customer

For most of the internet's history, we have built digital experiences for humans.

We designed websites to be attractive, navigation to be intuitive, and brands to be memorable.

We invested in marketing because we wanted people to remember us when they needed something.

But what happens when people stop browsing websites and start delegating their decisions to agents?

Your next customer might never visit your website. They might never see your advertising or remember your brand.

Instead, an agent will evaluate your offering, compare it with competitors, and decide whether you're the best option for the person it represents.

That means companies will need to compete on a different set of characteristics.

Pricing, availability, reliability, quality, and the ability to transact directly will become increasingly important.

The winners won't necessarily be the companies with the strongest presence inside a marketplace. They will be the ones that make it easiest for agents to find, evaluate, and buy from them.

Marketplaces were built to solve a problem humans had: finding the best option among an overwhelming number of choices.

AI agents are making that problem increasingly irrelevant.

And whenever technology makes a problem irrelevant, the businesses built around solving it have to reinvent themselves.

I don't think marketplaces are going away anytime soon.

But I do think their best days, at least as the gatekeepers of online commerce, are behind them.

The future of commerce isn't about being present in the biggest marketplace. It's about being available to whoever, or whatever, is making the buying decision.

And companies should start preparing for that future today.