Securing The Internet's Humanity

AI enables essentially infinite numbers of agents performing human-like actions, limited mainly by global compute. Trillions of agents could navigate the internet, gather market information, deploy capital, identify patterns and supply chains, and plan and book travel. This could free humans from administrative tasks, but it also creates a major security risk through social engineering, coercion, and agent-to-agent fraud and manipulation. Ad ecosystems must reevaluate success metrics because invalid digital ad traffic wastes large amounts of spend. Nonhuman traffic is not inherently harmful, since AI-driven retail traffic can show strong growth and higher conversion and spend. The core problem is the inability to distinguish human from agent audiences and to verify whether agents represent authentic human intent, making intelligent ad spend allocation difficult.

"With AI, the number of agents performing “human-like” actions is essentially infinite, dependent only on global compute. It isn't unreasonable to imagine trillions of agents navigating the internet in the coming decade. They will be collating information on the stock markets and deploying capital autonomously, picking out patterns, fabrics and factories for companies to use and planning, finding and booking our travel. The potential online actions are limitless."

"On one hand, this future allows humans more time to do the things we love (which, for a few of us, is the administrative task of being alive). On the other hand, it's an unbelievable security risk where agents socially engineer and coerce human beings through agent-to-agent fraud and manipulation. And we are already seeing the consequence of this spiral."

"Without the infrastructure to identify who is actually engaging with content, global ad ecosystems need to reevaluate the metrics they rely on to define success and determine what truly merits ad spend. For example, a recent study found that 8.5% of digital ad traffic is invalid, resulting in $63 billion of wasted spend."

"The real issue is that advertisers cannot yet distinguish between human and agent audiences, and importantly, we can't yet tell which agents are working for authentic human buyers. This makes it difficult to allocate spend intelligently. Until ad tech can verify not just whether a visit came from a person or an agent, but also the intent behind that interaction, billions will"

Read at Forbes