The development of agentic AI creates the prospect for the internet’s de facto information gatekeepers – social media and search – to be seriously disrupted, if not replaced, by AI agents acting as the new information synthesizers. A world where news and knowledge is increasingly delivered to us proactively by personalized agents, rather than in response to our own searching or scrolling, raises fundamental questions about every aspect of information production, delivery, and consumption.
Can we sustain the web as we’ve known it, where humans can continue to access news and knowledge directly from original sources, while growing an agentic web of high-quality information in parallel? Can technical and economic mechanisms be built into the agentic web to support better societal outcomes than what the advertising-supported, attention-maximizing web and mobile ecosystems have delivered? Against a backdrop of breathtaking accumulation of wealth in the hands of a small number of giant AI companies, can the design of nascent agentic AI markets build in protections against abuses of market power?
KGI’s Agentic Information Future initiative aims to address these pressing questions by convening experts and generating insights that respond to the rapidly evolving role of AI agents in the information ecosystem. The initiative is being designed to clarify this dynamic space and deliver empirical evidence and comprehensive analysis to inform technical and policy debates spanning technology standardization and open source development, competition policy, and media policy.
This initiative builds on KGI’s search competition work, which examines regulatory scrutiny of Google’s dominance and the implementation of competition enforcement regimes across different jurisdictions. Policy, technology, and business questions about nascent agentic information delivery paradigms are in many ways intertwined with market and enforcement dynamics in the search industry, while raising many novel considerations that extend beyond search
As this initiative develops, KGI will convene experts, produce comprehensive analysis, and release practical resources to inform emerging debates on agentic AI policy and technology. Early outputs include: