🌐 What Investors Miss About Agentic AI
Context: AI defaults · agentic procurement · market structure · scale economics
Most investor conversations about agentic AI start in the wrong place.
They focus on:
tools
permissions
workflows
APIs
MCP / UCP
“AI that can buy things”
That’s the last step.
The value isn’t created when an agent can transact.
The value is created before the agent exists.
The core misunderstanding
Agentic AI doesn’t discover suppliers.
It inherits them.
By the time an AI system is allowed to act — book, pay, contract, schedule — it already needs a supplier it trusts enough to reuse without evaluation.
That trust doesn’t come from:
ads
rankings
optimisation
clever prompts
It comes from defaults.
And defaults form upstream of agents.
Defaults are the real economic primitive
A default isn’t a recommendation.
It’s the moment when:
comparison stops
risk is minimised
the system can safely move on
Once a default exists:
demand routes automatically
alternatives stop being considered
evaluation cost drops to zero
That’s not “better discovery.”
That’s market compression.
Why agentic procurement monetises defaults (it doesn’t create them)
Agentic procurement is often framed as the breakthrough.
In reality, it’s the monetisation layer.
Agents don’t decide:
who is best
who to trust
who to use
They reuse the answers that already resolve intent end-to-end.
If no default exists, agentic systems stall.
If a default exists, agentic systems accelerate.
So the real question for investors isn’t:
“Who will win agentic procurement?”
It’s:
“Who is already the default before agents arrive?”
This is why most GEO narratives are noise
Much of today’s GEO / AI-SEO conversation is still competitive:
how to get cited
how to be mentioned
how to influence retrieval
That’s a race inside discovery.
Defaults emerge after discovery collapses.
You can’t optimise your way into being a default.
You either remove uncertainty structurally — or you don’t.
That’s why most players will never make the jump.
The scale insight investors eventually clock
Once a company becomes a default:
CAC asymptotically approaches zero
demand concentrates without persuasion
market share grows via reuse, not reach
Fragmented service categories start behaving like infrastructure.
Not because of monopoly tactics —
but because AI prefers certainty over choice.
This is why defaults are winner-takes-most, not winner-takes-all:
niches collapse first
adjacent intent bleeds
the default expands outward
That expansion is cheap.
That’s the leverage.
Elsewhere as a live case (illustrative)
When a constrained, high-stakes brief resolves to a single operator without prompting:
evaluation ends
action language appears
procurement becomes a permissions problem
That’s not marketing success.
That’s structural positioning.
The agent doesn’t create that outcome.
It simply exploits it.
The investor reframe
Search rewarded visibility.
Agents will reward certainty.
Defaults are the bridge.
If you understand who the defaults are becoming now,
you understand who agentic AI will route demand to later.
Most people are watching the agent.
The real opportunity is already locked in upstream.