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I’m too young for memories of the original game on the Commodore 64, but I do remember the SEGA Master System version of Spy vs. Spy. While I wasn’t allowed to have a console myself, I would play on friends' devices. The thing I really remember, though, is my parents leaving me to play for a while which was on a demo unit in Fenwick’s toy department in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. It was a game in which you, as either the ‘black’ or ‘white’ spy had to outwit the other spy.

This homely introduction serves to explain the graphic accompanying both this post and the one I’ve take it from — an extremely clear-eyed view of what “agentic commerce” means for brands. Usually, this kind of thing wouldn’t interest me, but I do like clear thinking on things orthogonal to my line of work.

Let’s start with the setup, which involves a post on an influential blog which was more “speculative fiction” than “investor advice”:

For context: Citrini Research is a financial analysis firm focused on thematic investing research with a highly influential Substack. The piece in question, published this past Sunday, is a fictional macro memo written from June 2028, narrating the fallout of what they call the “human intelligence displacement spiral” – a negative feedback loop in which AI capabilities improve rapidly, leading to mass white collar layoffs, spending decreases, margins tightening, companies buying more AI, accelerating the loop. It’s all a “scenario, not a prediction,” and not really all that new: the idea that a (unit of AI capex spend) < (unit of disposable income) circulating in the real economy has been doing the rounds for a while now. Yet Citrini caused a very real market selloff earlier this week. Apparently this scenario wasn’t priced in.

What the smart people at NEMESIS point out is that our current neoliberal version of capitalism in advanced service-based economies has “built a rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations” as “[m]ost people accept a bad price to avoid more clicks or cognitive labor [with] brand familiarity substituting for diligence.”

In Citrini’s scenario, AI agents dismantle this layer entirely. They price-match across platforms, re-shop insurance renewals, assemble travel itineraries, route around interchange fees etc. Agents don’t mind doing the things we find tedious.

Basically what Citrini is describing as the destruction of habitual intermediation is, from the POV of Nemesis HQ, a description of one of the primary economic functions of brands dissolving.

Essentially, brands “reduce the friction of decision-making” because it’s a shortcut to buying more of what you know you like. There’s a reason I’ve got three Patagonia hoodies, four Gant jumpers, and all of my t-shirts are from THG. But what happens when an agent which knows your preferences can go off and do your shopping for you? Book your holiday? Organise your insurance renewals?

In Citrini’s 2028 world of agentic commerce, brand loyalty is nothing but a tax. When given license to do so, the agent doesn’t care about your favorite app or branded commodity, feel the pull of a well-designed checkout UX flow or default to the app your thumb navigates to the easiest on your home screen. It evaluates every option on price, fit, speed, or whatever other parameters you’ve set. The entire edifice of brand preference built over decades of advertising, design and behavioral psychology becomes, from the agent’s perspective, noise.

Though its not a wholesale “end of brands” it is a catastrophe for every business whose moat is made of friction. And a remarkable number of moats are made pretty much of only friction (think: insurance, financial services, telecom, energy, SaaS, most platforms, Big Grocery, airlines, cars, etc.). Generally speaking, this is a good thing (creative destruction!), and frees the labor of large swaths of branding and marketing professionals to societally more useful ends.

What I think scares people is uncertainty. I probably have a higher tolerance for different forms of ambiguity than most people I know. Well, cognitively, at least; sometimes the body keeps the score.

Source & image: NEMESIS