Patrick Collison: Personal AI Agents Will Reshape How Companies Exploit Consumer Bounded Rationality
scottleibrand · x · 2026-10-10
Stripe CEO Patrick Collison shares his musings on AI agents entering the economy:
- Companies are the original superintelligence: firms leverage amortized cognitive surplus against consumers, who are inattentive, underinformed, and irrational — think of insurance upsells at checkout priced far above regular policies. Herbert Simon's bounded rationality explains why firms profit from this.
- Personal agents will make consumers more rational, partially rebalancing this asymmetric game.
- Price discrimination breaks down: when every consumer has an agent hunting for deals, mechanisms like coupons will no longer work the same way.
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