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Towards Agentic Economies: Eight Cases of New Commerce under AI

This joint CSO-médialab seminar will welcome Koray Caliskan (Parsons School of Design) and Donald MacKenzie (University of Edinburgh). They will present their recent paper discussing how AI is reshaping digital advertising and enabling a new agentic internet.

Event, Research Seminar

Salle K.008, 1 Place St-Thomas d'Aquin, 75007 Paris

Abstract: 

This paper examines AI’s integration into digital advertising and AI agents’ emergence as economic actors, part of a broader shift from the search internet, structured around queries/ranked results, to what we call the chatnet, a conversational agentic internet in which conversation and agentic transaction may become an important mode of economic coordination. The paper provides three analyses.

The first dismantles an AI system as a socio-technical formation with five constitutive parts, each actively mediating economic action.

The second traces how AI and ads are being integrated across six platforms: ChatGPT, Gemini, Meta AI, Grok, and Scope3, and also Anthropic, whose refusal to integrate ads constitutes a market position in its own right.

The third analysis documents confirmed instances of agent-initiated commerce in live production environments, including Amazon's Buy for Me, Walmart and OpenAI's Instant Checkout, and Visa's Intelligent Commerce initiative.

The paper synthesizes these empirical discussions by extending the stacked economization framework developed in earlier work. Stacking, we argue, now operates not only across modes of economization but across agents and their capacities to act: the platform has become an agentic economization environment, orchestrating delegated, distributed, and direct agency — human and non-human — within a single conversational economized interaction.

Biographies:

Koray Caliskan is an economic sociologist and organizational designer. He is the dean of the Parsons School of Design and a Professor of Strategic Design and Management, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Design Strategies, and Associate Editor of the Journal of Cultural Economy. He published Market Threads in 2010 and he has recently explored the new economy of cryptocurrencies. He released Data Money: Inside Cryptocurrencies and Their Communities, Blockchains, and Markets in 2023. 

Donald MacKenzie is a historian and sociologist of science and technology, and his research aims to throw new light on their role in shaping the modern world. He worked on nuclear systems, mathematical demonstration and the transformation of financial markets under mathematical models. With Koray Caliskan, he has explored the question of digital platforms. Most recently, they have authored Inside Digital Advertising: Platform Power, Data Icebergs, and Material Politics, published in 2025.

Practical informations:

Date: September 11th, 2026

Time: from 11:15 to 12:00

Location: room K.008, 1 Place Saint-Thomas d’Aquin, 75007 Paris; or online (Zoom) 

Language: English

Registration is mandatory via this link.