AI and corporate profits

This is an interesting view:

A lot of companies make money because their customers can’t be bothered to monitor them more closely, or to insource something. Customers let the company make some money in exchange for doing a decent-enough job and making the problem go away.

Bank of America has $2 trillion of deposits, not a penny of which is optimized. Most enterprise software vendors could be switched out far more often, or displaced by home-built software, but it’s too much of a pain. I could run a 12-party RFP for an Uber ride or a pair of socks, but I don’t.

In a sense, many professionals are an extension of the same idea. I could research my own real estate law, or my own insurance, whether business or personal, but I don’t because it would be too hard.

Google Search might be the biggest example. It makes money because advertisers know they need to be at the top of the results to be found. But my agent will happily search all the results across multiple search engines.

AI agents should change all this. By acting as incredibly rational and vigilant sourcing agents, CFOs, and experts for their users, they will take rents previously collected by these toll-takers and redistribute them to consumers.

On the other hand, unlike the methodological abstraction homo econonomicus, actual humans running actual businesses are somewhat irrational. So we'll see how that plays out.

As one commenter noted:

This was already discussed even as far back as 2024 and especially during the SaaS apocalypse stock crash, which erased nearly a trillion dollars in market value in early 2026. The stock price drops have recovered almost entirely. If this is true, why did they recover?

The stock market is irrational. People are irrational. Also, I think people who are technically minded underestimate the extent to which other people really aren't.

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Source: marginalrevolution.com
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Collection: ai-culture-futures