Rachel Pasqua

Commercial AI needs premium-quality, domain-specific data to build and maintain a competitive edge and that content isn’t readily available on the open internet. For organizations that have accumulated clean, proprietary datasets tied to their product, workflows, or industry, that need presents a lucrative licensing opportunity.

For AI agents to participate in economic activity, they need a form of money they can actually use. That immediately rules out most of the existing financial system. Modern payments infrastructure is built around identity, regulation, and institutional intermediaries. Every transaction assumes a human account holder, a bank relationship, and a chain of entities responsible for verifying who someone is before money can move.

The Limits of Scale In a 2012 interview with Fast Company , Bob Greenberg, founder of R/GA and a pioneer of the digital agency model, made a simple observation: once an organization grows beyond roughly 200 people, maintaining a creative culture becomes extremely difficult . Greenberg’s observation aligns with Dunbar’s number , the idea that a human can maintain stable working relationships with an average of 150 people. Beyond that point, communication becomes more formal, collaboration...