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How I Invest · 3 min · Oct 26, 2026
AI agents could expand the market beyond human users
Matthew Harris argues agents could multiply AI's potential users far beyond eight billion people.
In this episode
Full analysis- 1:58Valuation discipline can make venture firms miss power-law winnersPro pick 5 min
- 17:35AI labs may avoid competing with their biggest customers6 min
- 32:44Anthropic's growth could support its reported $2 trillion valuation4 min
- 11:53Bain's AI strategy centers on robotics and AI-native services6 min
- 8:51AI market leadership can shift despite consensus investing3 min
- 27:59OpenAI's open Codex strategy could win the application layer5 min
- 52:38Steady venture pacing helps limit cycle-driven risk5 min
- 39:48AI agents could expand the market beyond human users3 min
“And at a certain point, increasingly in our companies, there aren't even human users of AI. There are just agents doing stuff.”
Takeaways
- Agents could take AI use beyond the world's eight billion people.
- Lower prices can expand demand for intelligence.
- Rising supply makes frontier-model value difficult to predict.
About this segment
Matthew Harris argues agents could multiply AI's potential users far beyond eight billion people. But cheaper models and rising supply leave the future value of frontier models uncertain.
Matthew Harris is a Partner at Bain Capital Ventures focused on financial services and technology.
David Weisburd, Host
From “Anthropic at $2 Trillion? The AI Bubble, and Why the Best Startups Always Look Overvalued”, Oct 26, 2026. Watch the full episode
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
Transcript
From the transcript How I Invest publishes with the episode.
- 40:01
I'd say the two countervailing things in my mind when I hear that one is vehement agreement. And at a certain point, increasingly in our companies, there aren't even human users of AI. There are just agents doing stuff. And so it's not 8,000,000,000 that you're going, you know, that 8,000,000,000 humans getting more productive. It's actually 80 or 800,000,000,000 new entities being created. And then they're doing deals with each other.
- 40:29
And they're doing and they're using tools and creating more agents. Yeah, right. So I actually think that, you know, this this artificial cap of 8,000,000,000 as we think about market size is for the first time lifted because of agents that have proven they can do long running tasks with great efficacy. So I agree with Lucas and I would amplify it. And then the one caveat is open way models. So intelligence is becoming more abundant.
- 41:00
It's also becoming cheaper. Those who are related, it's abundance and people's desire and ability to access it gets greater as the price comes down. So there is this beautiful expansionary quality to open weight models and even just the token cost of old anthropic models being so much less expensive than new anthropic models. But that mix shift and exactly how that mix shift happens for what applications is the $2,000,000,000,000 question.
- 41:33
I think there's no doubt that demand is going to expand and that will have a benefit to pricing as demand expands. It helps pricing, but supply is massively expanding as well. And so the value of a frontier model is what we don't know. If the twenty twenty seven frontier models are as transformational relative to the 26 models as the '26 models were to 2025, then I think 2,000,000,000,000 is surely just a starting point.
- 42:06
We basically went in '25 until about November, December 2025. It's still chatbot territory and kind of like finish your line of code but not independent long running reasoning agents doing their own coding. That was really sort of winter twenty five, twenty six. And that led to SaaSpocalypse and that led to all of these advances in agentic workflows the course of 2026. So I don't know what the next leg up is.
- 42:39
I don't know when it comes and if it's as dramatic as chatbot to agent. But if it is, then open weight models that don't have the frontier capabilities yet will be a pale substitute for those high priced tokens.