The agentic economy is coming. Not chatbots, not copilots, but autonomous AI agents that can plan, decide, transact, and spawn sub-agents to carry out tasks their principals may never have explicitly authorised. The open-source platform OpenClaw has triggered a national frenzy in China, with local governments subsidising “one-person companies” built on networks of agents, and tech giants racing to release their own versions. [1] In London on Tuesday, Rachel Reeves used her Mais lecture to pledge that the UK would achieve the fastest AI adoption in the G7, backed by a £2.5 billion package for AI and quantum technologies, including a £500 million Sovereign AI Fund launching in April. [2] The Sovereign AI Fund is a promising initial commitment. But the Chancellor’s speech largely neglected the role that autonomous agents will play in future productivity, and entirely neglected the question of how that activity will be financed.
Autonomous agents will be a major source of future economic growth. They will transform how firms operate, how services are delivered, and how individuals participate in the economy. A single person using a network of agents can already do work that previously required a team. And agents spawn sub-agents, which spawn further sub-agents, creating cascading networks of autonomous activity that can grow exponentially. There is no obvious ceiling: the agentic economy could become as large and as complex as the economy we already have. As the technology matures, agents will manage procurement, execute transactions, allocate resources, conduct research, and negotiate terms across supply chains. The scale of the productivity gains will be substantial, and the countries that enable them will grow faster.