The Agentic Web: Will the next platform war lead to Oligopolies or Fragmentation
Walmart’s integration of its 240 million e-commerce shoppers with OpenAI’s 700 million weekly active users should be your wakeup call. It’s a preview of how the Agentic Web will either unlock unprecedented value or fracture into incompatible fiefdoms.
When every major retailer, financial institution, and B2C company ties itself to a handful of ‘agent stores’, we don’t get an Internet of Agents—we get a Balkanized landscape of unintentional walled gardens where your agent can’t talk to mine, innovation stalls, and trillions in potential value evaporate.
The next platform war is here. The Internet of AI Agents risks splintering into proprietary silos, leading to either incumbent oligopolies extracting monopoly rents or fragmentation that prevents valuable services from emerging. Immediate coordination on interoperability standards—for agent identity, discovery, and marketplace infrastructure—is crucial. Early movers who establish these rails will control future AI transactions; those who wait will be building on others’ platforms or become irrelevant.
Project NANDA (Networked AI Agents in Decentralized Architecture) which originated at MIT provides the three-phase technical roadmap to capture this opportunity: Agent Foundations, Agent Economy and Agent Societies. Project Nanda aims to dismantle the four critical choke points within this ecosystem’s infrastructure by focusing on consensus driven innovation: ‘DNS’, ‘CA’, ‘Orchestration’, and ‘Attestation’.
Project NANDA employs a three-pronged approach: (i) Technology: Building technology, standards, and reference implementations through a collective of top minds. (ii) Social Mission: Working to maintain an open Agentic Web for innovators while ensuring safety for vulnerable populations. (iii) Venture Ecosystem: Fostering a wide coalition of founders and investors to facilitate information sharing.
NANDA’s development draws on proven MIT research in AutoML, split learning, privacy-preserving architectures, and decentralized coordination. Early partners in the coalition gain preferential access to emerging standards, reference implementations, and the academic-industry consortium that will influence the emerging frameworks globally.
Join us in-person for an intimate discussion on the future of the agentic web and the opportunities for tech leaders.
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Bio
Ramesh Raskar is an Associate Professor at MIT, leading pioneering research at the intersection of distributed AI agent architectures, health technology, and computational imaging. As a founding architect of NANDA, he focuses on agentic web infrastructure that empowers decentralized decision-making in complex systems. He received the National Academy of Inventors award (2024), Lemelson Award (2016) and ACM SIGGRAPH Achievement Award (2017). He has worked on special research projects at Google [X], Apple and Facebook and co-founded/advised several companies. He holds 100+ US patents.