In a wide-ranging conversation at the CoinDesk Spotlight, Schultz laid out a vision for Meta’s future in which agent commerce is not a product category, but an inevitability.
“We think this could be the next level of business for our entire company,” he told host Sam Yuen.
The agency economy already exists, but it is unevenly distributed
Schultz framed the agency economy in the same way that science fiction author William Gibson framed the future: already present, not yet mainstream.
“We create business agents for all businesses,” he said. “We have over a million active businesses per week with Meta agents (…) from virtually zero at the beginning of the year.”
The use case he outlined was deliberately down-to-earth: coordinating a child’s birthday party. Agents book appointments, check calendars, find places, communicate with other parents’ agents, all via WhatsApp. The point of the everyday example is that it scales. If agents can handle logistics at low rates, they can handle supply chain negotiations, financial settlements, and cross-border trade.
“You write that example big,” Schultz said, “and then if you’re us, you hope you’re going to do it over WhatsApp.”
The payment layer in this vision is stablecoins.
