author: sgershuni
What?
The digital economy is shifting from selling inputs (clicks, hours) to delivering verified outcomes.
So what?
Power moves from platforms that sell your attention to AI agents that fulfill your intention.
Now what?
This creates huge opportunity for builders to create the infrastructure for intent matching, routing, evaluation, and settlement.
Imagine: you need to renovate your kitchen.
Today, you become an unwilling, unpaid general contractor. Weeks of work ahead: find an architect, vet contractors, source materials from a dozen suppliers, navigate permits, align schedules, manage payments. Forty-seven browser tabs open. Three spreadsheets. Endless phone calls. The project succeeds only if you can manually coordinate dozens of disconnected services.
Tomorrow, you state one intent: "Renovate my kitchen, mid-century modern, $40k, done by June." Your AI assistant breaks this into tasks and broadcasts them to a network of specialized agents. Within seconds, automated auctions run across every step: design, materials, labor, permits. Providers compete on price, speed, quality, and reputation. The best combinations win. Work gets validated automatically. Payment releases on completion. You get progress updates.
The project is managed for you, not by you.
This is the Intent Economy. The shift from selling attention to fulfilling intention. From inputs to outcomes. From platforms that monetize your confusion to markets that compete for your goal.
The digital economy is restructuring around a simple idea: the best interface is the one where you say what you want once, and the system figures out how to deliver it. This article explains why this shift is inevitable, how these systems will work, and what it means for founders building the infrastructure of this new economy.
The digital economy is undergoing a paradigm shift, moving from a model built on capturing user attention to one centered on fulfilling user intent. This article presents cyber•Fund's thesis that this transition is inevitable, driven by fundamental advances in AI, economics, and cryptography. The emerging "Intent Economy" is a high-speed, automated, and decentralized marketplace where users broadcast specific goals or “personalized RFPs”, and a network of specialized AI agents compete in real-time to fulfill them. This will streamline user experience, increase the market efficiency, disrupt incumbent business models and create new opportunities for founders.
The fundamental unit of economic activity is shifting from inputs (labor hours, software seats, ad clicks) to verified outcomes. Value is captured by autonomous agents that translate user's intent into an achieved well-specified goal.
Today, in the Attention Economy when you make a search query on Google or Amazon, the platform sits between you and the provider. A credibly neutral, decentralized Intention Economy removes this conflict: no single party can see all intents and preferentially route them for profit. Agents compete on their merit and ability to provide the best possible product or service.