AI Agent 'Unbundling' Reshapes Market, Pressuring Big Tech

MIT's mapping of the AI agent ecosystem confirms a strategic inflection point: the market is moving past headline-grabbing general agents toward a fragmented landscape of specialized, function-specific bots. This signals a maturation from monolithic AGI pursuits to a diverse, practical agent economy. The shift prioritizes tangible utility over generalized intelligence, forcing the industry to rethink what an “agent” is and how value is created, moving from a single product to a complex system.

This fragmentation puts direct pressure on large model providers whose narrative centers on a single, dominant agent. The second-order effect is the emergence of a new, critical infrastructure layer for agent orchestration and interoperability, benefiting companies that can manage multi-agent systems. It raises the stakes for platform providers, whose success will now depend on fostering an integrated ecosystem rather than just building the most powerful standalone agent. The key question becomes who will build the agent-to-agent economy.