Current approaches to AI governance often fall short in anticipating a future where AI agents manage critical tasks, such as financial operations, administrative functions, and beyond. As AI agents may eventually delegate tasks among themselves to optimize efficiency, understanding the foundational principles of human value exchange could offer insights into how AI-driven economies might operate. Just as trust and value exchange are central to human interactions in open marketplaces, they may also be critical for enabling secure and efficient interactions among AI agents. While cryptocurrencies could serve as the foundation for monetizing value exchange in a collaboration and delegation dynamic among AI agents, a critical question remains: how can these agents reliably determine whom to trust, and how can humans ensure meaningful oversight and control as an economy of AI agents scales and evolves? This paper is a call for a collective exploration of cryptoeconomic incentives, which can help design decentralized governance systems that allow AI agents to autonomously interact and exchange value while ensuring human oversight via progressive decentralization. Toward this end, I propose a research agenda to address the question of agent-to-agent trust using AgentBound Tokens, which are non-transferable, non-fungible tokens uniquely tied to individual AI agents, akin to Soulbound tokens for humans in Web3. By staking ABTs as collateral for autonomous actions within an agent-to-agent network via a proof-of-stake mechanism, agents may be incentivized towards ethical behavior, and penalties for misconduct are automatically enforced.

Opt-in doomsayers believe this legislation could cripple the entire advertising industry because consumers will have more meaningful control over their privacy, and authenticated audiences will shrink as a result. However, the trends that have shaped the market can be bucked, and publishers and advertisers have an exciting opportunity to create a new ecosystem in compliance with the opt-in marketplace that benefits everyone involved – including consumers. Further, the browser and device manufacturer changes that are already in-progress are already moving the industry towards a more logged-in environment, in which it becomes easier for consumers to opt in as they authenticate. As we look towards an opt-in era in the future, it's important that publishers and marketers consider how the industry arrived at this point, and the lessons they can take away from this journey. Under the opt-out default, it's easy to see that the consumer experience has been lacking, and a lot of that falls on technology. The opt-out default enabled the propagation of third-party cookies, and the collection of data – often in a way that was not as transparent as it could have been for consumers.

Applying digital footprints and data exhaust use AI to build anonymous and explicit profiles. Every individual, device, or network provides some information. That digital footprint or exhaust could come from facial analysis, a network IP address, or even one's walking gait. Using AI and cognitive reckoning, systems can start to analyze patterns and correlate identity. That means that AI services will recognize and know individuals across difference contexts.

Seven million years ago, the first ancestors of mankind appeared in Africa and seven million years later, as we speak, mankind's existence is being traced by archaeologists in South Africa, where they believe they are finding several missing links in our history. A history traced back to the first hominid forms. What is a hominid, I hear you say, and when did it exist? Well, way back when scientists believe that the Eurasian and American tectonic plates collided and then settled, creating a massive flat area in Africa, after the Ice Age. This new massive field was flat for hundreds of miles, as far as the eye could see, and the apes that inhabited this land suddenly found there were no trees to climb. This meant that the apes found it hard going thundering over hundreds of miles on their hands and feet, so they started to stand up to make it easier to move over the land. This resulted in a change in the wiring of the brain, which, over thousands of years, led to the early forms of what is now recognized as human. The first link to understanding this chain was the discovery of Lucy. Lucy--named after the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"--is the first skeleton that could be pieced together to show how these early human forms appeared on the African plains in the post-Ice Age world. The skeleton was found in the early 1970s in Ethiopia by paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson and is an early example of the hominid australopithecine, dating back to about 3.2 million years ago. The skeleton presents a small skull akin to that of most apes, plus evidence of a walking gait that was bipedal and upright, similar to that of humans and other hominids. This combination supports the view of human evolution that bipedalism preceded an increase in brain size. Since Lucy was found, there have been many other astonishing discoveries in what is now called the "Cradle of Humankind" in South Africa, a Unesco World Heritage site.

The combination of machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and cognitive computing will change the ways that humans and machines interact with our environments. AI-driven smart services will sense one's surroundings, know one's preferences are from past behavior, and subtly guide people and machines through their daily lives in ways that will truly feel seamless. This quest to deliver AI driven smart services across all industries and business processes will usher the most significant shift in computing and business this decade and beyond. Organizations can expect AI driven smart services to impact future of work flows, IOT services, customer experience journeys, and block chain distributed ledgers. Success requires the establishment of AI outcomes (see Figure 1).