The internet built its business models on attention economics. The platforms that captured and monetized human attention—Google with search queries, Facebook with social feeds—became trillion-dollar companies. But AI agents shift the basis of value. In the Agent Economy, distribution pivots from attention to outcomes.
Instead of competing for clicks, agents transact on results. Who solved the problem fastest? Who produced the most accurate synthesis? Who unlocked the best outcome at the lowest cost? That transition rewires the hierarchy of distribution and exposes new leverage points.
The New Distribution Pyramid maps this reordering. It starts with infrastructure monopolies and moves upward through orchestration, specialized agents, APIs, and applications—all the way to the human orchestrators at the top.
At the base sit the power monopolies: the players who control compute, models, and data access. NVIDIA, with its GPU chokehold, remains the primary bottleneck. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta sit on proprietary models. AWS, Azure, and GCP control global compute distribution.
These actors don’t compete for consumer attention—they extract value through compute rent, token fees, and GPU hours. Every query, every agent action, every orchestration passes through this layer. It’s the toll road of the Agent Economy.
Integration control. Owning the model/API becomes a gatekeeping function.
Data gravity. Infrastructure monopolies benefit from both usage and outcomes flowing back into model training.
The lesson: if you’re not building here, you’re paying here.
Layer 2: Agent Orchestration Platforms
Above infrastructure lies the coordination layer. This is where agents are routed, governed, and interconnected. Platforms like Copilot Studio, AWS AgentCore, and Salesforce Agentforce are already jockeying to own orchestration.
Why is this layer so critical? Because the Agent Economy is not about isolated bots. It’s about multi-agent systems: one agent finding data, another validating results, another executing workflows. Without orchestration, you get chaos. With orchestration, you get scale.
Functions of orchestration:
Routing: Deciding which agent handles which task.
Governance: Enforcing compliance, identity, and permissions.
This layer introduces a new kind of platform lock-in. Whoever controls orchestration controls coordination power. It’s the new App Store, but for agents instead of apps.
Layer 3: Specialized Agent Layer
Next comes specialization—the rise of domain-expert agents. These aren’t general-purpose chatbots. They are tightly scoped, vertically integrated, and often monetized via outcome-based pricing.
Code-generation agents with deep integration into dev pipelines.
The value capture mechanism here is not attention but task mastery. Organizations will pay a premium for agents that deliver trusted outcomes in high-stakes domains—healthcare, law, engineering, finance.
This layer is where vertical leaders emerge. Just as Shopify dominated e-commerce enablement, or Epic controlled medical records, we’ll see category-defining agent players who own niches through trust, expertise, and integration.
Layer 4: Tools & API Layer
If specialized agents are the performers, the Tools & API layer are the instruments. This includes machine-readable APIs, microservices, and per-query interfaces that make agents interoperable.
Key shifts:
From human-accessible UIs to agent-accessible APIs. Interfaces will be designed for machines first.
From subscription to per-query pricing. Instead of SaaS seats, usage will be billed per agent call or outcome achieved.
From aggregation to micro-service distribution. Agents won’t consume entire platforms—they’ll call specific functions via APIs.
The tolls here are subtle but powerful: API pricing, data premiums, and usage fees. In effect, every capability becomes an API endpoint for agents to consume and monetize.
Layer 5: Applications
At the top of the machine stack are applications—the human-agent interfaces. These will look familiar: dashboards, copilots, assistants. But the economic logic shifts.
Instead of optimizing for time spent (the logic of attention economics), applications will optimize for frictionless human-agent interaction. The winner isn’t who keeps you engaged. The winner is who gets you the outcome with the fewest inputs.
Think of it as the reverse Facebookmodel. Success is not measured in hours captured but in seconds saved.
Layer 6: Human Orchestration
Finally, above the stack sits the human orchestrator. Unlike the industrial internet, where consumers were passive endpoints, the Agent Economy re-centers human expertise.
Humans will orchestrate across layers:
Defining goals. Agents need direction, not open-ended autonomy.
Curating trust. Humans decide which agent outputs to accept, reject, or refine.
Shaping governance. Cultural, ethical, and regulatory norms remain human-led.
The paradox is clear: the Agent Economy automates everything except judgment. That becomes the rarest, most valuable function.
The pyramid doesn’t eliminate tolls—it multiplies them. The question for every player is where in the stack you want to pay vs. where you want to charge.
Strategic Implications
Outcome Economics Replace Attention Economics Agents don’t scroll, they solve. Value shifts to whoever can prove consistent delivery of outcomes.
Monopolies at the Base, Niches at the Top Infrastructure remains concentrated; specialization rewards fragmentation. This duality defines the ecosystem.
The New Bottlenecks Are Governance and Trust Scaling agents isn’t just technical—it’s regulatory and cultural. Trust becomes the binding constraint.
Vertical Integration Beats Horizontal Spread General-purpose assistants will lose to vertically integrated agents that combine domain expertise with orchestration and compliance.
Conclusion
The New Distribution Pyramid shows how AI agents reorder digital economics. Attention was the fuel of Web2. Outcomes are the fuel of the Agent Economy.
From NVIDIA’s GPU rent to Salesforce’s orchestration tolls, from specialized compliance agents to human orchestrators, the pyramid maps not just the technical stack but the economic battlefield.
Winners will understand two truths:
Every layer has its tolls. The question is whether you’re paying them or collecting them.
Outcomes, not eyeballs, drive value. In an economy where agents transact for us, success belongs to those who deliver results, not distractions.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
