Patrick Collison: Personal intelligent agents or enhancing the returns of quality products

The co-founder and CEO of payment company Stripe, Patrick Collison, posted on X, outlining several changes after personal agents enter the economic system. He stated: companies are, in a sense, the original superintelligences, often able to leverage amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests in scenarios such as upselling insurance at the end of the booking process, where consumers have relatively limited attention, insufficient information, or are not fully rational; the bounded rationality proposed by Herbert Simon is often exploited by businesses, while personal agents may make people more rational when dealing with companies.

Patrick Collison mentioned: the effects of price discrimination such as coupons may weaken, and cross-subsidies like users who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidizing those who actively cancel will also change, but in terms of the overall economy, it remains uncertain who will ultimately bear these impacts. He believes that personal agents serve as a structural subsidy for product quality; if individuals consistently invest significant time researching purchasing decisions, making products better will become a more effective company strategy, and information about product quality will also become more important and influential.

He also wrote: currently, most people have limited ability to integrate product quality data, while agents will have a sustained demand for such signals; data, in addition to helping train models, will also be more valuable as a cheaper form of intelligence. Whether agents reinforce the star product effect, or increase choice dispersion due to better identification of differentiated preferences, as well as how demand routing and display costs driven by short attention will change, remains an open question. The above judgments depend on whether personal agents stand on the side of consumers; he believes that the returns for high-quality products may increase.