Will 2025 be the year of the agent? A primer for competition practitioners on the next wave of AI innovation

AI innovation is increasingly focusing on the development and utilization of AI agents: systems that gather information, make decisions and take actions with some degree of autonomy. Agents represent a natural evolution from AI that generates outputs following user commands, such as ChatGPT, to AI that plays a much more active role by completing tasks. For example, in the future, a consumer AI agent might book and pay for a holiday or decide which groceries to order. Tech luminaries believe agents will make AI truly transformative, and tech firms and investors have been investing in AI agents as they look to monetize AI. Given the emerging focus on agents, it will not be long before competition agencies take a closer look to assess any concerns against benefits. This article previews some of the likely debates to come. Many possible issues that could be raised appear analogous to those of other digital markets, such as self-preferencing, pre-installation and defaults, market tipping and ecosystem effects. But agencies may also raise new or potentially more challenging issues about AI agents, ranging from access to hardware/software, conflict of interests, use of personalized data, to a lack of transparency. Equally, agents might trigger more seismic changes in the competitive landscape.