Goldman Sachs exec: world to be rebuilt for AI agents

The article, authored by a Goldman Sachs Global Institute co-head, frames AI's rise as an infrastructural shift comparable to steel, cars, or the internet. It argues that as machine intelligence advances — citing Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's 'country of geniuses in a data center' and Elon Musk's prediction that AI could exceed human intelligence in about five years — our built environment will be reconfigured for bots, both digital and physical.

Concrete examples ground the thesis. Zipline's drone delivery, born from blood plasma delivery in Rwanda, now partners with Walmart and Uber, with physical changes like wall cutouts in a Supercenter. Travis Kalanick's CloudKitchens is retrofitting facilities for robotic food prep, and humanoid robots may be outnumbered by utilitarian machines optimized for tasks like making '1,000 pancakes an hour.'

The software stack is also shifting: AI agents, powered by LLMs, favor APIs over human interfaces, pushing toward 'headless software' and usage-based pricing. The article suggests that classical human-centric software's value may shrink as SaaS becomes data repositories for agent workflows. While no specific timeline or size is given, it implies a gradual but inevitable transformation, with the caveat that changes won't happen overnight.