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Key Takeaways AI agents don’t persist, so meaningful business metrics collapse.
The real customer is now the model making selections, not the human developer.
Moats built on loyalty vanish when every transaction resets the market.
AI agents aren’t human customers, and that breaks everything we know about how markets behave. They don’t have purchasing habits, don’t experience friction and don’t develop brand loyalty. After spending years as a quant at the global hedge fund Citadel, I’m cursed to always think in finance terms, but it’s helped me spot the patterns hidden in plain sight.
What I’m seeing is that AI agents are now our customers, but we are still measuring them like they are people. We are applying human metrics — customer acquisition cost (CAC), lifetime value and retention rates — to entities that don’t persist long enough for those metrics to mean anything.
We need new ways to measure penetration and new criteria for what makes customer relationships last.
Why agent customers break the model
For decades, venture-backed companies paid huge sums to bootstrap network effects because customers stuck around. After Uber launched, rides were heavily discounted. They operated at a loss, betting that customers would get hooked and stay. Now it’s hard for any other ride-share to threaten Uber’s incumbency, though many have tried. That upfront spending built something that has endured.
AI agents break the durability assumption. Unlike people whose loyalty can be earned, they appear, transact and disappear.
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