Source: Nate’s Substack
A new layer of infrastructure intermediaries—not foundational AI labs—now control whether companies can deploy agents into production. This creates a bottleneck that rewards integration expertise over raw model capability. Historical tech transitions show a pattern: standards bodies and platform operators captured more value than component manufacturers. In the agent economy, whoever can reliably answer those seven shipping questions may win more than whoever trained the largest model. For brands and growth teams, agent ROI depends less on model choice and more on selecting the right integration partner. This changes how they approach procurement and partnership decisions.