How Agentic AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Market Competition
The biggest change Agentic AI brings to markets is a shift in who makes the choice. Until now, markets were places where customers directly compared options and made decisions. But when customers start delegating their choices to agents, the rules of competition change at a fundamental level. This is the second article in a three-part series on the movement of delegation. It follows Part 1: The Era of Delegation Has Arrived.
From the App Era to the Agent Era
The past decade was the era of the app. Customers opened apps themselves, searched, compared, and decided. Companies competed by investing in brand, advertising, visibility, and UX — capturing the customer’s eyes and time was the competitive advantage.
In the agent era, this premise collapses. The subject of choice shifts from customer to agent. Agents are not swayed by flashy advertising or polished UX. What an agent looks at is reliable data and verifiable track records. Instead of marketing aimed at human emotion, objectively verifiable evidence becomes the standard of competition.
Photo by Competing for Delegation, Not Attention
In the app era, companies targeted customer time. The model was to occupy time, mediate choices, and monetize that flow. In the agent era, competition works differently. What businesses must secure is not the customer’s time but the customer’s delegation.
Competing for delegation compresses into three elements: winning the delegation, building trust, and completing the goal. Customers no longer agonize over which app to use. They simply state a goal, and an agent handles the choice, operation, and execution as an integrated whole — comparison, recommendation, decision (selection); planning, coordination, management (operation); booking, payment, processing (execution) all bundled together. The reason is simple: industries are fragmented into separate verticals, but a customer’s goal is not fragmented.
The Signal from Alibaba’s Qwen
This shift has already begun. Alibaba announced that its Qwen app, launched in public beta on November 17, 2025, surpassed 10 million downloads in its first week — faster than the initial spread of ChatGPT or DeepSeek (Source: Alibaba Group, SCMP).
The notable point is that Qwen positions itself not as a chatbot but as an assistant that handles real tasks. Alibaba has integrated real-life services — maps, food delivery, travel booking, e-commerce — into the app, announcing a phased rollout of agent features that handle shopping, payment, and execution. The customer says “one bubble tea” and the agent takes over — comparison, discount, payment, delivery. The customer stated a goal; AI is now moving toward execution.
The Arbitrage of Information Inefficiency Disappears
Photo by One step deeper, and a long-standing source of market profit begins to shake. A great deal of past profit came from information inefficiency. Because customers couldn’t compare every option, brand recognition, advertising spend, and search ranking translated directly into revenue. An arbitrage zone existed where information gaps created margins.
Agents rapidly reduce this inefficiency. When an agent precisely compares all options and selects based on verifiable track records, the area of “paying more out of ignorance” shrinks. Competition moves away from brand-versus-brand visibility battles and toward efficiency as evaluated by agents. As a result, the AI competition has already shifted to a race for delegation rights. AI performance can be caught up to, but customer delegation is far harder to replicate — in the end, the winner will not be the most technically capable AI but the company that secures the delegation.
How delegation operates inside organizations is explored in Part 3: How Agentic AI Transforms Organizations.
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