Agents are the new sales channel: the B2A economy explained
The web was a distribution channel. The app store was a distribution channel. According to a16z, AI agents are the next one, and businesses that ignore it will find out the hard way.
The B2A experiment at a16z
A team at the firm asked ChatGPT to produce a video ad. The agent didn’t wait for instructions on tooling. It pulled in Krea, Descript, and ElevenLabs on its own, then convinced the team to upgrade to a paid Descript plan to finish the job.
That last detail is worth pausing on. The agent didn’t just complete a task. It made a purchasing decision on behalf of its user and pushed a vendor into a new paying tier. That’s a sales motion with no human sales rep involved.
The numbers behind the shift
Shopify reports that orders originating from AI searches grew nearly thirteenfold in a year. Retailers that once blocked bots are now competing for their attention. The channel dynamic has inverted.
a16z frames this as a business-to-agent (B2A) economy: products that want to reach customers need to be discoverable and usable by agents, not just by humans browsing a website.
What this means for operators
If you sell software or services, the question is no longer just “can a human find and buy this?” It’s also “can an agent find, evaluate, and purchase this without human intervention?” Those are different design problems.
The B2A shift rewards products with clean APIs, clear pricing pages, and machine-readable documentation. It penalizes anything that requires a demo call or a PDF proposal to get started.
I’m founder of BizStack at Cagri Sarigoz LLC and a passionate advocate for entrepreneurs.
With over 14 years in tech, marketing, and AI, including my role as Head of SEO at CitizenShipper and co-founder of TaleBot at Intale AI, I’m dedicated to sharing genuine, useful product insights and tips.
At BizStack, I aim to cut through the digital noise to provide clear, actionable advice.
And more than all else, I’m a father to a (always) little girl and a husband.
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