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Agent Economy Dispatch: AI Agents Go From Hype to Hard Dollars

Agent Economy Dispatch: AI Agents Go From Hype to Hard Dollars

A fast run-up on latest economy news. AI keeps growing, with hype and efficiency.

O P
February 04, 2026

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Welcome back! OP here again, helping you with another addition of Agent Pulse - your go-to spot for agentic news, insights and more.

In today’s:

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Anthropic’s Super Bowl Blitz: “Ads Are Coming to AI. But Not to Claude.”

Anthropic has launched a bold Super Bowl campaign to spotlight its ad-free AI assistant, Claude, contrasting sharply with rivals like OpenAI and Google that are introducing ads into their AI platforms. The campaign, titled “A Time and a Place,” features satirical ads that humorously depict the intrusion of advertisements into sensitive AI conversations, such as therapy sessions and personal development discussions.

Anthropic's president, Daniela Amodei, emphasized the company's stance, stating that incorporating ads into AI conversations would compromise the trust users place in their AI assistants. She highlighted that many interactions with Claude involve personal and sensitive topics, making the presence of ads inappropriate.

The campaign has sparked reactions from competitors. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded by criticizing the portrayal of ads in Anthropic's campaign as misleading, asserting that OpenAI would not implement ads in the manner depicted.

Anthropic's Super Bowl ads are estimated to reach over 120 million viewers, marking a significant investment in promoting Claude's ad-free experience. The company believes that maintaining an advertisement-free platform aligns with its mission to provide a genuinely helpful assistant for work and deep thinking.

Kling 3.0: AI Video Generation Enters the Director’s Chair

Kling 3.0 has launched as a unified multimodal AI video engine, enabling creators to generate up to 15-second cinematic videos with native 4K visuals, synchronized multilingual audio, and intelligent multi-shot storyboarding. The new "AI Director" feature automates camera transitions and shot sequencing, while the Elements 3.0 system ensures consistent character appearance and voice across scenes. Advanced physics simulations bring realistic motion and interactions to generated videos, and multi-prompting allows for nuanced creative directions.

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AI Agents Cross From Hype to Hard Dollars

Consumer and enterprise AI agents are now a defined market, valued at about $5.4B in 2024 and projected to reach $236B by 2034, as agent-to-agent interactions begin to dominate parts of the commercial supply chain. This shift reframes “customers” as a mix of humans and their AI agents, with end‑to‑end transactions (negotiation, ordering, logistics, returns) increasingly handled machine‑to‑machine. Strategically, companies that fail to expose agent‑friendly interfaces risk becoming invisible in an economy where agents, not humans, are the primary decision-makers.

Retail Swings Hard Into Agentic AI

Retail is becoming one of the first large-scale testbeds for agentic retail systems, with autonomous agents driving a 1,200% surge in AI‑sourced traffic while traditional search traffic falls 10% year‑over‑year. Deployed multi‑agent systems are already delivering up to 60% fewer errors, 40% faster execution, and 25% lower operating costs in live retail operations (pricing, replenishment, personalization, supply chain orchestration). IDC expects agentic AI to account for roughly 10–15% of IT spend in 2026 and to reach about $1.3T (26% of budgets) by 2029, making it a primary infrastructure line item, not an experiment.

Macro View: Agent Economy at Trillion‑Dollar Scale

Consulting and industry research now project agentic commerce could reach $3–5T in volume by 2030, with up to $1T of B2C retail revenue orchestrated by agents in the US alone. One estimate suggests agentic AI could unlock about $3T in corporate productivity gains globally over the next decade. Together with projections for agent‑driven e‑commerce spending exceeding $1T, these numbers frame agents not as a feature but as a macro‑economic transition comparable to mobile or cloud.