Imagine a marketplace—digital or physical—where suddenly AI agents appear. Not just a few, but a flood. A tsunami of well-designed, tireless algorithmic entities all optimized to buy, sell, negotiate, and transact.

This isn’t about robots replacing warehouse workers. This is about bots that want things. Bots that need things. Bots that have been programmed to acquire, trade, and maximize value according to whatever metrics their creators deemed important.

What happens then?

First, human pace disappears. The deliberative pause, the consideration, the wandering through options—gone. These agents don’t sleep. They don’t hesitate. They execute at machine speed.

The marketplace that operated on human timescales suddenly operates at the speed of silicon. Transactions that took minutes compress into microseconds. Opportunities vanish before most humans recognize they existed.

Second, pricing dynamics transform. When thousands of optimization engines all pursue the same underpriced asset simultaneously, prices don’t just rise—they spike vertically. When those same engines decide to liquidate, markets don’t dip—they cliff-dive.

But here’s the real revelation: markets exist to serve human needs. They’re social technologies we built to coordinate our collective activities. When agents optimize for narrow metrics—profit, acquisition, throughput—they miss the point. They’re playing the game by the rules while forgetting why we created the game in the first place.

The smallest viable audience in an agent-flooded marketplace isn’t humans anymore. It’s other agents. And agents don’t care about story, meaning, connection—all the things that make commerce human.

So what’s the alternative? Not to ban the bots, but to be intentional about the marketplaces we design. To build in friction where friction serves human needs. To privilege human pace and human values where they matter most.

The question isn’t whether AI agents will enter our marketplaces. They’re already here in nascent forms. The question is whether we’ll shape these marketplaces to remain fundamentally human, or whether we’ll wake up one day to find we’ve optimized away the very reasons we trade in the first place.