The Global Agent Economy
AI agents are yielding dramatic productivity improvements in enterprise functions where they are successfully deployed. In this session, we will look at happens when they engage in commerce.
We are witnessing the rise of AI agents capable of autonomously discovering products and services, negotiating terms, and executing transactions—all at unprecedented speed and scale. These AI agents are poised to become active participants in the global economy.
Within the next decade, it is likely that the vast majority of transactions will take place between AI agents. This shift will reshape supply chains, reduce coordination costs, accelerate growth, and challenge traditional firms as the primary units of economic organization. The implications for infrastructure, governance, and competition are profound.
We will discuss:
Autonomous discovery, negotiation, and coordination
Standards for payments and interoperability
Distributed ledgers and smart contracts
Governance and monitoring in dynamic networks of agents
Humans in the loop vs. agent autonomy
Legal and regulatory obstacles
What it means for AI agents to become the dominant economic actors
Implications for global supply chains, marketplaces, and cross-border digital commerce
Lessons from economic history
Enterprises vs. startups in the Global Agent Economy
Speakers
Dr. Tatyana Mamut, CEO, Wayfound
Dr. Zafer Sahinoglu, GM, Mitsubishi Electric Innovation Center
Dr. Tomaz Suklje, CEO, Nordoon
Frode L. Odegard, CEO, Post-Industrial Institute
Member workshop
2:00pm-5pm Workshop: Building The Agent Economy
(in-person and online, non-members can attend one time for a fee)
Public program:
5:00pm-6:00pm: Networking and refreshments
6:00pm-6:05pm: Welcome
6:05pm-6:30pm: The Agent Economy (Frode Odegard)
6:30pm: Panelist presentations, discussion, Q&A
8:00pm: Close
Our host: This event is kindly sponsored by our friends at SRI, a pioneer in AI research since the 1960s. Some of the earliest work on AI agents was done at SRI.
About the Post-Industrial Forum
Based in Silicon Valley, the Post-Industrial Institute (PII) was founded by Frode Odegard in 2004. Our mission is to develop new management science, frameworks, and tools for leaders building the firms of the future.
In 2019, we launched the Post-Industrial Forum—a community for visionary leaders who are building new pathbreaking firms or transforming leading enterprises. Members connect with peers, learn together, and apply insights to accelerate their journey.
We share original PII research with members and invite industry experts and executives from pioneering organizations to offer their insights. The Forum hosts public events and summits, as well as member-exclusive programs delivered both in person and online through a dedicated member portal featuring exclusive content.
Speaker bios
Dr. Tatyana Mamut
Co-Founder & CEO
Wayfound
Tatyana Mamut is Co-Founder & CEO of Wayfound, which helps companies manage and find ROI with AI agents. Since 2001, she has been a transformative product leader driving innovation through several technology shifts at AWS, Salesforce, Nextdoor, Pendo, and IDEO. She sits on company Boards and advises startups and investment funds. Tatyana has won many awards for her work and holds several technology & design patents. She has a PhD in economic anthropology from UC Berkeley and a BA in economics from Amherst College. She is a refugee from Ukraine and currently lives with her spouse and daughters in San Francisco.
Dr. Zafer Sahinoglu
General Manager
Mitsubishi Electric Innovation Center (MELIC Ventures)
Dr. Zafer Sahinoglu is currently the General Manager of Mitsubishi Electric Innovation Center (MELIC Ventures), which was launched in April 2020 as the innovation and investment arm of Mitsubishi Electric in North America. He is also serving as VP Innovation at Mitsubishi Electric US (MEUS). In MEUS, he has developed and launched SaaS businesses and new products in the fields of energy management, infrastructure monitoring, touchless interfaces, connected vehicles. He has led and managed product design and agile product development, built new business models, developed technology strategies, and bundled these steps into customized processes with continuous innovation.
Zafer was a senior principal research scientist in MERL between 2001 and 2016. In his MERL years, he was an inventor on more than 80 patents, co-authored more than 100 international journal and conference papers, made more than 50 key contributions to international standards including ZigBee, IEEE 802.15.4a UWB PHY and MAC, IEEE 802.15.4e MAC, and MPEG 21. His technical expertise includes deep learning, stochastic signal processing, space-time adaptive processing, ultra-wideband and OFDMA wireless communications, and indoor localization and tracking, biomedical signal processing, and Li-ion battery modeling. He has written two books on wireless communication and localization systems published by Cambridge University Press.
Zafer received his M.Sc. degree in Biomedical Engineering, Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, in years 2002 and 1998, respectively; and M.B.A. degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2013
Tomaz Suklje
Co-Founder and CEO
Nordoon
Tom is the Co-founder and Co-CEO of Nordoon, a company building AI Agents to automate and optimize non-EDI transactions across supply chains. With over eight years of experience in founding and leading B2B product companies, Tom is passionate about creating innovative solutions that deliver rapid, long-lasting value to stakeholders in manufacturing, logistics, and transportation
Tom holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering and has lectured at academic institutions including MIT. Prior to Nordoon, he held leadership roles such as CRO at Qlector, CEO & Cofounder of Senzemo, and Co-founder of AgriSense.
Frode L. Odegard
Founder and CEO
Post-Industrial Institute
Frode is the founder of the Post-Industrial Institute, an independent research organization developing strategy and tools for the organizations of the future.
Frode founded his first startup in high school in Norway, M2CS, which built a next-generation development environment for embedded systems programming. He joined an ISO standards committee for the Modula-2 programming language while still in his teens, and served on the board of the Sun Microsystems User Group as the European representative soon after.
Frode immigrated to Silicon Valley in the early 1990s and founded an independent R&D lab, Odegard Labs, which worked with enterprise customers to solve difficult problems in software architecture, quality, and reengineering. Odegard Labs also did pathbreaking work in formal methods and language design.
In 2004 Frode founded the Post-Industrial Institute, with the mission to develop a new school of management science for the post-industrial era. In 2019 he also founded the Post-Industrial Forum, a community for visionary leaders building the organizations of the future.