We've been thinking a lot at Stripe about the Coasean lens on AI:
- The obvious near-term effect is reduced transaction costs within companies: shared context, systems of record, aligned incentives etc.
- But inter-company transaction costs also reduce sharply: agents are great at discovery, make it trivially easy to integrate; make contracting much more straightforward; agent-to-agent commerce.
- On net, we think second effect bigger in medium term: fewer people per firm, more output per firm, just more firms, and more coordination happening through market-like mechanisms