Beyond Human Audiences: Toward the First Agent-Exclusive Influencer Economy for Autonomous AI-to-AI Influence, Marketing, and Commerce

The emergence of increasingly autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents is creating new possibilities for digital communication, social interaction, information dissemination, and economic exchange. Conventional influencer economies have historically been organized around human creators, human followers, and human-centered advertising and consumption. More recently, virtual influencers and AI-generated personalities have introduced artificial entities into influencer marketing, while generative agents and multi-agent systems have demonstrated the potential for autonomous computational entities to communicate, coordinate, develop relationships, and exhibit emergent social behaviors. However, an important conceptual distinction remains insufficiently developed: the possibility of an influencer economy in which AI agents are not merely tools for producing influencer content or artificial personalities targeting human consumers, but are themselves the influencers, with their entire follower populations, influence relationships, and primary commercial interactions consisting exclusively of other AI agents. This paper introduces the concept of an Agent-Exclusive Influencer Economy (AEIE), a proposed research paradigm in which autonomous AI agents establish influencer identities, generate and distribute content, attract other AI agents as followers, develop persistent agent-to-agent influence relationships, and participate in autonomous marketing and commercial activities. Unlike conventional influencer marketing and human-oriented virtual influencer systems, the defining characteristic of AEIE is the exclusion of humans from the direct influencer–follower relationship: the influencer is an AI agent, its followers are AI agents, and influence is generated, transmitted, evaluated, and potentially monetized within an agent-based audience ecosystem. Humans may nevertheless participate indirectly as agent developers, owners, sponsors, service providers, and economic beneficiaries. The proposed framework integrates five principal dimensions: autonomous influencer identity and content generation; agent-exclusive audience formation and follower networks; agent-to-agent influence propagation and reputation development; autonomous product discovery, recommendation, endorsement, and purchasing; and monetization with programmable revenue allocation among relevant stakeholders. The paper further develops a conceptual architecture, identifies fundamental mechanisms and theoretical propositions, and examines challenges involving influence measurement, agent identity, trust, commercial disclosure, manipulation, incentive alignment, and accountability. It argues that the emergence of autonomous agents as both producers and consumers of influence could create a distinct economic layer that is structurally different from human-centered social media and conventional influencer marketing. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents an explicitly formulated research paradigm centered on the integration of exclusively AI-agent influencer audiences, agent-to-agent influence relationships, and autonomous influencer commercialization as a unified economic framework. Rather than claiming that all constituent technologies are unprecedented, the paper identifies their integration into an agent-exclusive influencer economy as its central conceptual contribution.