While the world was distracted by the hype of the metaverse and chatting with bots, the technology actually arrived in a way few expected.
While we are moving from an era of asking artificial intelligence questions to an era where AI agents actually do the work for us, and it's the rise of agentic commerce.
Well, we are talking about a future where hundreds of billions of digital agents could manage our lives, our finances, and also our businesses on the black.
Blockchain.
But joining us here to discuss this radical shift is Yat Siu, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Animoca Brands.
Yeah, great to see you here in Miami.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you for having me.
Well, first and foremost, tell us what you expect agentic artificial intelligence to do as we head into the future.
It's going to completely transform everything, we think.
In fact, you know, we would want to say that agentic AI is essentially what we would like to describe as web 4, right, in the sense that it's completely going to alter the way that we browse the web.
Just think.
About the last time that you actually went and searched on Google, right?
When did you click through to the website after you saw it on Google?
You probably didn't.
You got the summary, it was good enough, right?
And that also means that traditional websites, the traffic is down, the advertising revenue is lower.
Uh, in fact, maybe in some cases, it's crashed down to up to 80%, right?
And in this case, the agent is the one who's actually finding the content for you, delivering for you, right?
They're gonna do your shopping, they're gonna do your flight bookings, they're gonna schedule all of these things for you.
Um, you know, they can code stuff for you, right?
So, Your abilities have just basically multiplied, you know, in a way, the early days of the internet for things like Instagram and TikTok made you sort of a media personality with tools that you couldn't do before because you didn't have to be a Hollywood producer.
And now basically with an AI agent, they can code, they can do actions for you, they can make you more productive.
I have over 200 agents myself, for instance.
However, I think most people will have dozens of agents in the future, if not more, which comes down to your earlier statement, which is that we're gonna have hundreds of billions of agents roaming around.
They're gonna be doing business with each other.
They're going to be sort of transacting with the other on the blockchain, right?
And again, blockchain is perfect for that, right?
Because think about, you know, all the technology that we built with blockchain now can transact trillions of dollars of volume of transactions.
Um, this is now something that, you know, humans still struggle with, but an AI agent will have no problem in doing so.
You can't bank an AI agent, I mean, the, uh, in a bank, but they can have a wallet, right?
And so, so we think that agenda commerce is gonna sort of rise a lot because of that, because the agents are gonna do business with each other.
Yeah, and yet the way that you utilize AI and agentic agents may be more advanced than the average consumer out there.
So I do want to ask you, because you mentioned advertising, right?
You and I are humans.
If we see an ad out there, whether we're talking about streaming television, our laptop or smartphones, we might get affected.
By that.
But if we're talking about agentic AI doing a lot of this consuming of the content and doing transactions, what does it mean for the world of advertising?
Well, they're consuming content on your behalf because it's not for themselves, because you want something, right?
They'll just distill it for you, and I already saw that already when you're doing a search, right?
You know, you might, you, as you go to chat GPT, they give you a summary.
Right?
And the big complaint is, OK, Chat GBT, you got this information from the web.
What am I getting for this information I created?
And on the back, this is where we think the commerce process piece has to happen, right?
Instead of basically paying advertising, uh, you're basically transacting these small transaction fees that might literally be a fraction of a cent, right?
But you just do that at scale, and that's where the revenue comes from.
Now, advertising.
Uh, this year is projected to be close to $1 trillion you know, basically from, from digital advertising.
That is a form of a transaction that, however, we think in the future is going to be shifting towards agents who, you know, at the end of the day are trading your attention in a different way.
Think about where the attention is locked right now.
It's attention is locked in places like Instagram or the App Store or in TikTok because of convenience, because of network effects, right?
However, the agent doesn't care about that.
Like if I want content, if I want to make a connection, like in the future, even if I want to make a Relation, do I actually go to a website and find something, or will I just tell the agent, hey, I'm looking for these kind of people who are interested in this type of stuff.
They're gonna go out and hunt, and then on the other side, someone will have something and they're gonna find each other.
Their entire website or let's say platform as we know it is going to completely dissolve.
They're not gonna care about that.
We still have human attention.
The agent just gives it to us in a much more efficient format.
We're gonna consume data much faster, more efficient, because they're not clicking through and browsing this and seeing ads.
We're gonna get what we want, right?
And we're willing to pay for that.
And that's basically where I think advertising is gonna go, which means advertising isn't dead.
It just means advertising is gonna go to places that we actually are asking for.
Like, I want this ad because it's something I care about.
For instance, I have pets, and I want to know what the best prices are on certain pet food.
That's OK.
There'll be a discount.
That'll be the form of advertising that might come to you that the agent delivers to you, but it's not gonna be, I'm gonna spam you with stuff that you don't want and eventually hope that you get persuaded with some kind of subliminal messaging.
So yeah, I have time for one quick question.
So tell me why an agent's reputation is more important than proving a human's identity when it comes to this digital economy.
Well, I mean, humans already have a passport.
We already can identify ourselves in terms of who we are, right?
What's important is that an agent has to not only prove his reputation, but also prove who owns it from a liability perspective.
So we think that's necessary.
So KYA know your agent is going to be more important.
And so digital identity is a Kind of technology that, you know, is important for humans, but much more important for an agent.
Because again, we're talking about hundreds of billions of agents roaming around in the future.
You know, how do I know he's a real agent?
How do I, I mean, how do I know he's a good agent, right?
How do I know that he's trustable?
And it's not good enough to know who owns it because it's a little bit like children, right?
You have a family, except now you don't have maybe 1 or 2 or 3 kids.
You have literally hundreds of kids because they're all your agents, right?
You can think of it that way.
But similar to your own family, you don't have the same reputation.
For every child, right, they share a common lineage which gives them an element of that reputation.
But then even in the family, there's one that has a better one for whatever reason.
Maybe they code better, maybe they have skills that are more sort of desired, uh, maybe they have a better moral framing.
You don't know that, but the reputation score will tell you that, and then you're more likely to want to do business with them.
And that to us is how you can organize civilization and society, and we think the next wave of this is going to be the gentic civilization.
Yeah, so what is your timeline for this?
Oh, I think, I think it's gonna happen very fast.
I think in the next 3 to 5 years we're gonna see sort of a massive evolution.
I actually think we're gonna onboard a billion people on the blockchain through agents much faster than humans themselves.
Well, yeah, I think depending on who you're talking to, it might seem like a sci-fi movie that we're talking about, but I know given your work this is reality and your vision, so we will see how all of this unfolds as we move into the future.
And finally, for our viewers out there, where can they learn a little bit more about what you're doing when it comes to Animaca?
So actually, um, and I mean Anna Brands as a website, but actually for the Agentic. stuff.
I would encourage everyone to go to hellominds.AI.
Uh, we just launched a $10 million investment, uh, opportunity for people who want to build on agentic AI type of stuff with Hello Minds.
We're now basically funding up to $10 million to companies who are interested in sort of, you know, growing that space.
We think of that as the next big opportunity, similar to what we saw in the early days of blockchain, where there's NFTs, Metaverse, or RWAs or stablecoins.
We think it's that, it's, it's that level.
Uh, so yeah.
Go to hellominds.
AI and learn about that.
And of course if you want to see what I have to say, I'm, I'm on X.
I'm on LinkedIn, uh, and of course I'm on Medium as well.
Well, yeah, I really appreciate your time.
I know that you and I have talked before at the New York Stock Exchange as well as other conferences, but we're just kicking off this 3 day conference at Consensus 2026 here in Miami.
So I appreciate your time as always.
Thank you so much for all of your perspective.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you.
