{"id":779788,"date":"2026-09-23T08:36:28","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T08:36:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/779788\/"},"modified":"2026-09-23T08:36:28","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T08:36:28","slug":"agentic-reality-citrini-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/779788\/","title":{"rendered":"Agentic Reality – Citrini Research"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Seven months ago, we pontificated on a scenario called The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis<\/a> \u2013 a future in which AI disruptions sent ripples across the global economy. In this thought experiment, we made no directional market calls but rather laid out a series of potential disruptions and how they could interact. Our caveat, that we would be \u201cright about a few and almost certainly wrong about more\u201d got overlooked by a crowd more concerned with the next three months of price action.<\/p>\n

But things are changing \u2013 and we are already beginning to see where our thoughts about the impact of agents removing friction were right and wrong. People are starting to take notice\u2026perhaps most hilariously summed up by our friend BuccoCapital<\/a> (second time one of his tweets has made it into an article, third time gets a prize).<\/p>\n

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Obviously, the \u201cCitrini Trade\u201d is based off of our February article. But this has been a focus for us since the beginning, our first article was on the beneficiaries of the AI trade, but our second was on the losers – titled \u201cLess Deus, More Machina\u201d<\/a>. And while each individual instance may appear to be \u201csell first, ask questions later\u201d, the cumulative effect will – in our view – be a gradual pricing in of the most likely to occur disruptions due to AI.<\/p>\n

After all, we\u2019re spending trillions of dollars, nobody is left that doubts this is a paradigm shift in technology. It\u2019s unlikely that this is the only paradigm shift that causes disruptions to incumbent business models.<\/p>\n

Just as the market has evolved in its understanding, so have we. And we\u2019ve come a long way from 2023\u2019s hate-selling of Chegg\u2026 back in February, most of the people selling the intermediaries were using a frame of reference that was \u201cthe chatbot can show you a hotel\u201d. Now, we\u2019re past the tipping point.<\/p>\n

Consumer-facing agents have been kicking around for a while but Meta\u2019s consumer agent \u2013 Muse<\/a>, with a free tier at 100 million tokens per week \u2013 seems like a watershed moment, not necessarily because of its technical abilities but because of its reach.<\/p>\n

Relative to other bots out there, it feels less robust than other solutions. Yet that\u2019s the lament of every tech geek when a more consumer friendly version enters the market. It probably means they are on the right track. Meta is deliberately targeting consumers, not enterprises, with Muse.<\/p>\n

In our little bubble, \u201cAI Agents\u201d have been a topic of discussion for the past few years. But, we think it\u2019s safe to say that this is the first time the broader population will derive utility from consumer agents. Muse is achieving product market fit, having rocketed to the #1 spot in the App Store, with more than 700,000 downloads on the first day.<\/p>\n

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Agentic\u2019s Studio Ghibli moment is here.<\/p>\n

First, let\u2019s revisit our thought piece from February:<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s far from a fait accompli, but if you look at the moves in the market since Muse came into the zeitgeist you\u2019d be hard pressed to say we haven\u2019t benefitted from beginning to think about this back in February (actually, back in June 2023<\/a>) instead of last week. We got some things right, and other things wrong (the card companies are probably not going to be the losers here). But it does seem like many of the other stars are aligning.<\/p>\n

Tactics that worked when consumer behavior was dictated by human psychology will fall by the wayside, and those that fail to adapt will be left behind.<\/p>\n

Every day from now on we will see new examples of areas where friction was profitable becoming cost centers for companies that don\u2019t react in a timely enough manner.<\/p>\n

Today you might realize just how many flight credits, loyalty points or promotional offers you\u2019ve never used that will end up utilized by agents. You may use an agent to save you money on subscriptions, services or recurring expenses. \u201cWhat impact will that have?\u201d is a question that won\u2019t be asked just by niche investment research firms, but by the populace at large.<\/p>\n

Tomorrow, you might see something that makes you ask how much money health insurers make simply because people won\u2019t sit on the phone for 5 hours trying to get coverage approved unless it\u2019s a massive expense and\/or life or death matter.<\/p>\n

What about your savings account or cash balances earning little to no yield? That money could be in a money market fund, but you haven\u2019t bothered to move it. How much in net interest income is made because of that friction?<\/p>\n

The coming years will be some of the most interesting for investors who are intrigued by paradigm shifts and their ripple effects.<\/p>\n

Thankfully, with the benefit of more information and observing real-world implementation, it feels like an apt time to revisit the question:<\/p>\n

Who wins? And who loses?<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been writing about the impact of AI since we began, and not just limited to the data center.<\/p>\n

We can see the back-end, though. Despite our efforts to cover the second and third-order impacts from AI use rather than the first-order impact from its scaling, we know many of you have glossed over these in favor of reading yet another article about semis supply chain bottlenecks. That\u2019s okay, that was the right thing to do in the first half. But now the market is a bit different.<\/p>\n

So, rather than repeat in depth, here\u2019s the recap:<\/p>\n

[Original Framework] In June 2023, our second ever paid article was titled Less Deus, More Machina<\/a> and detailed losers due to AI in chatbot form (with some hints at the potential for agentic disruption). Our standalone short basket heavily favored call centers, BPO, stock images, expense products, staffing agencies, legal tech and no-code website building solutions.<\/p>\n

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SPY climbed 75% since publication while our short basket dropped nearly 40%. However, many of these businesses are either extremely small now or consensus shorts at high risk of a squeeze.<\/p>\n

The underlying question of the piece, though, remains useful\u2026how much of a company\u2019s economics survives when its customers can accomplish the same task more easily? Consumer agents extend that question to the effort involved in comparing, switching, negotiating and cancelling.<\/p>\n

So far, in 2026, our coverage has been primarily centered on the impact of Agents \u2013 the shift from \u201cwho builds it\u201d to \u201cwho uses it\u201d. And for the most part, we\u2019ve been looking for the beneficiaries rather than losers.<\/p>\n

[Cybersecurity] Earlier this year the market had a conniption when it understood the second order effects of coding bots. The baby, along with the bathwater, was thrown out in a fire sale of software equities. Some of the selloff was justified, but we felt there was a large overreaction.<\/p>\n

\u201cSelling cybersecurity names because of agentic coding advancements is, for lack of a more apt word, stupid.<\/p>\n

If AI agents are truly about to proliferate across every enterprise on Earth, performing tasks autonomously, accessing systems, making API calls, and moving data around, does that make cybersecurity less important? No. With great confidence, definitely not. And yet the market sold CRWD, NET, RBRK, PANW and ZS alongside TEAM and CRM as if they were the same trade.\u201d<\/p>\n

[Infrastructure Software, Networking, Observability] In our Agentic Utilities<\/a> piece from March, we saw that infrastructure software businesses \u2013 spanning CPaaS, networking, observability, and more \u2013 were unfairly punished for the risks posed to its GICS peers. Meanwhile, the evolving character of the internet and the explosion of agentic AI meant that these services would be even more vital during the forthcoming cycle.<\/p>\n

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[Strategically-Aligned Retailers] Then, in June\u2019s State of the Themes<\/a>, we highlighted Shopify (SHOP US) as a winner amidst the disaggregation of online shopping. The stock had also been caught in the wash of the software selloff, despite the fact that AI would empower the long tail of retailers to meet the bespoke needs of consumers.<\/p>\n

\u201cShopify (SHOP US): A second-order winner of the agentic boom lives in the e-commerce universe \u2013 specifically, the long tail of retailers. Disaggregation and unique purchasing habits are levered to AI, as consumer tastes are more accurately and uniquely targeted \u2013 driving increased conversions for niche products\u201d<\/p>\n

[Meta] Finally, in All Along the AI Watchtower<\/a>, we borrowed a term from our high school maths teachers in PEMDAS (Please Excuse Meta\u2019s Deliberate AI Spending), where we rebuked the market\u2019s view that it was the black sheep of the hyperscaler complex and likened the setup to Google circa July 2025.<\/p>\n

\u201cDespite the prevailing negative narrative on Google (GOOGL US) web search and Gemini disappointment, we highlighted the company as an unappreciated winner and it\u2019s up nearly 80% since. Now, a year later, does Meta (META US) provide a similar setup?\u201d<\/p>\n

(It\u2019s certainly starting to look like it).<\/p>\n

Our broad lines of thinking haven\u2019t changed, but we continue to sharpen our views as this moves from theory to real world observation.<\/p>\n

The idea is simple: agents work for consumers. Their raison d\u2019\u00eatre is to make people\u2019s lives better by getting them the best products and the best prices, personalized to their preferences, without the hassle.<\/p>\n

The clearest cut beneficiaries are those that either build the agents, make them better, or provide the infrastructure for them to operate. The losers are those that have no way to adapt to the new way of doing things.<\/p>\n

As we stand today, here are three ways to play the Agentic Reality:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Seven months ago, we pontificated on a scenario called The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis \u2013 a future in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":779789,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-779788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=779788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779788\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/779789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=779788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=779788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=779788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}