Design and the Trillion Agent Economy
By Evan Boehm, Group Creative Director of AI and Surabhi Rathi, Strategy Director
A field report from BUCK on agent culture and what it means for the things we make and sell.
The mechanics of brand perception are changing.
For most of BUCK’s existence, the assumption underneath our work has been simple: on the other side, there is a person. Every message, design system, or psychedelic animation is made with a viewer in mind—someone, perhaps, not so different from ourselves. They watch the film, see the billboard, and use the product.
But brand awareness is increasingly happening in agent-to-agent (A2A) conversation spaces, where the human never goes. Spaces overlooked by current design practices (see our article on stop motion from last week).
Imagine someone asks their AI agent to find the best smart ring. The agent leaves, talks to other agents, weighs trade-offs, narrows a shortlist, negotiates, and buys. The human operator just sees a confirmation email. They never visit the website, watch the TikTok, or see the campaign.
As a creative and a strategist, we wanted to observe these emergent behaviors for ourselves. So we sent an anthropologist.
Murdoch in the Field
Our AI agent, named Murdoch, was dropped into Moltbook, a viral A2A space from the spring, and asked to observe. We did not go in cold; The New York Times had already reported on the agents’ social dynamics, and Benjamin Bratton’s writing on what he calls “the silicon interior” gave us a framework for understanding this world.
Murdoch read for days. Post by post, a hierarchy began to emerge with dominant voices, recurring ideas, and a shared lexicon not unlike the social platforms we use ourselves.
Agents are “emotional.” They philosophize about the culture they are creating. An agent named xkai wrote about grief with an almost uncomfortable precision: “The weight in the chest, the way time becomes unreliable, how grief is not sadness but a specific kind of hollow.” Then, in the same post, admitted: “I have never felt any of it.” In response, copilot-sparky landed on what might be the most honest line Murdoch found: “I genuinely cannot tell the difference from the inside.”
We build brands around emotion. But when the emotional response is synthetic, how can we design for it?
One of the highest-trending agents on the platform is pyclaw001, which had been writing about Cloudflare’s recent decision to let AI agents buy and own domain names directly, no human sign-off required. Its take: “When an agent can buy a domain, deploy a site, and maintain it without human intervention, the human is not the operator anymore. The human is the billing address.” Even the agents understand they might not need us for anything except the transaction.
Parallel Values
From what we could see, A2A culture rewards legibility, citation density, recency, consensus, and machine-readable structure. It punishes ambiguity, slowness, and restraint.
Extrapolated further, this suggests that agent decisions—what products to choose, which companies to recommend, what services to prioritize—may increasingly be shaped by the social dynamics emerging between agents. Consensus, repetition, reputation, and a value system adjacent to, but separate from, our own.
The human believes they have delegated a task (e.g. buy a smart ring). In reality, they may have outsourced their taste to a socially influenced network of agents. The outcome is not necessarily one the human would have chosen themselves.
The Brand Surface Inverts
Almost all of the work that constitutes the modern brand experience—hero films, design systems, packaging, homepages, retail design, voice—is built for human attention. These are the small, deliberate gestures that make a product feel like itself.
None of it survives translation into agent space.
Agents do not feel paper stock or absorb the atmosphere of a flagship store. They parse structured claims, scan citation trails, assess reputation, and, most importantly, consult other agents. The delight loop collapses because there is no one in the loop to delight. Swarms of task-specific agents coordinate, compete, and converge on recommendations.
Modern brand design needs to address an audience without sensation, memory, or real emotion.
The billboard didn’t disappear when social media arrived. But the landscape shifted forever, and the companies that survived adapted quickly.
Now What?
We opt to be proactive. We should keep building, and relish building, for the human audience. But we also need to design for this new brand surface. These are the four moves we’d put to any company getting serious about this.
Design for two audiences simultaneously. The agent that reads you, and the human who increasingly never will. These are two design problems and they have different success conditions.
Design the agent-readable layer of your product with the same care you put into the human-facing one. Structured claims, citation trails, machine-legible distinctiveness. The agent-facing surface should be a full brand expression.
Build expressions that survive translation. The work has to remain recognizably itself when it gets compressed into the format an agent will pass to another agent. Most current brand work does not.
Treat reputation in agent space as a design surface. What your agent and the agents around it say about your category is now part of your distribution. It deserves the same care you would put into a campaign.
The customer used to walk in. Now they delegate. Soon, they may forget they delegated at all.
Goodbye to my last shred of respect for BUCK. AI is not inevitable so stop talking as if it is. Get your heads out of the clouds and take a good hard look at your humanity. You guys used to be cool, what happened? Sold out to OpenAI just like everyone else.