Every technology wave gets built around the flow of money. We still “wire” money because Western Union started money transfer over actual telegraph wires in 1871. The first electric grid in the world was built in lower Manhattan so its wires could reach Wall Street.
In the modern era, the first business computer application ever run was payroll for a British teashop chain. The PC found its killer app in VisiCalc and people bought Apple IIs to run a spreadsheet. The internet’s breakout moment was a shopping cart: Amazon, eBay, and the secure checkout page. Mobile repeated that with handheld commerce with Uber and Square.
LLMs and agents broke that pattern. We have directed all of our investment to the creation and synthesis of information, not money, more efficiently. Coding has been the killer app of generative AI. That’s starting to change with the rise of personal agents that feel like magic.
But when it comes to commerce, the experience still sucks. We are expected to hand rogue agents our credit cards only to watch them book, cancel, and mess up transactions. We open up our personal finances to agents only to see them leak through prompt injections. And all this, through complete black boxes that we just hope and pray operate correctly. What does a world with truly native agentic money and commerce look like?
Playground is a lab for building that future.