We all know the troll on duty who screams something provocative, sometimes humiliating a particular group, and drags in a flood of "negative attention." Then someone stands up and whispers, "Hey, stop getting angry at him — that's exactly what he wants and needs: attention. Your outrage is his greatest reward." The problem is that he really did manage to infuriate us, and we're trapped inside an attention economy that rewards trolls.
I personally know an Instagram influencer who tried to break through for three years without success. At some point he went to a woman who had built a career by calling salaried workers pathetic. She taught him how to whip his audience into a frenzy with inflammatory, vicious statements (usually followed by "clarifications" that tried to explain the supposed "depth" behind the viral content, producing a narcissistic-style reconciliation). That's what shattered the glass ceiling and catapulted him into public awareness.
Sure, there are plenty of influencers with genuinely high-quality content. But I think they, more than anyone else, can tell you that the mechanism rewards provocation and fakery. Getting professional facials from a licensed aesthetician, then posting a viral before-and-after about a 30-shekel cream that will probably wreck your skin — link in bio.
Is it over?
One morning I decided to invest in my skin and build a science-grade skincare routine. I went to stores and tried to make sense of the premium brand packaging positioned on just the right shelf with just the right wink; then I searched Google, Instagram, tried to find or understand something. Then the salesman pulled me aside and said: "Listen to what I did — I photographed my skin, sent it to the chat, told it what I wanted, and it recommended the exact right products. Look at my skin after two months." I believed him.
I took the photo. I asked the chat. The chat analyzed every cream and brand available in the country based on my skin type and my emphasis on scientifically proven ingredients — and boom, I got the perfect creams (mostly CeraVe, if you're wondering — made by dermatologists who created formulations with real chemistry and the packaging of an '80s pharmaceutical company). That moment made it crystal clear: the attention economy is about to be replaced by the agentic economy.
What the hell is the agentic economy?
Until today, you could create a brilliant engineering product — scientifically proven, solving a real problem. Upload all the information to your website and then silence, crickets. Nobody knows you exist. You're advancing at the pace of a mentally ill turtle. Why? Because no human on earth is searching for your niche term on page 12 of Google's search results.
To get into customers' heads and reach the market, you had to advertise. That could mean Google Ads, a physical location with clear signage, a social media campaign, influencers, a billboard campaign — or, more often, a combination of all of these together, hoping it would be enough to make distracted, scrolling customers spare you a moment of their time.
Today, a customer presents the chat with their problem and asks for creative solutions. The agent scans 10,000 pages of information, tries to verify the data — and boom, your product appears before them with a link or a specific phrase that leads straight to you. What would take a human 100 years to read and allocate attention to, took the agent 0.8 seconds.
How will this reshape things?
This is one of those questions you can't answer with certainty, but there are plenty of logical implications — and whoever organizes around them first and efficiently may win the game. The first and most important shift is moving away from marketing built on hollow slogans that stirred people's emotions but say nothing to agents — toward marketing that integrates emotion and rationality.
If in the past your product's quality combined with its marketing penetrated the market and got the wheel spinning, today the engineering quality, the code, the standards, the raw materials — whatever testifies to and verifies your advantage — needs to be transparent and displayed. An AI agent will award it the score you need to win the smartest, most loyal customers.
The impact of this is far more extreme than it appears. It starts with which product to manufacture or import in the first place, where to allocate new budgets, how to optimize websites for agents, and so on. There has never been a bigger disruption to the advertising world and the strategic thinking of businesses than this transition from the attention economy to the agentic economy.
Is this good for me or bad for me?
This dramatic shift sounds like the wet dream of consumers, but that's not quite right. It will deepen the divide between foolish customers who buy packaging at outrageous prices and smart customers who buy proven products at fair prices. It may create a far less diverse world, which will demand that brands invest much more in their product's narrative and in shaping the customer's perception of value.
I expect we're on the verge of a massive wave of "data manipulation" and fake-science techniques designed to make agents prioritize a particular product. But this is an intellectual arms race far more formidable than the two-second attention grab that ruled until now. It's also possible that the agentic economy will hand the stage back to scientists and entrepreneurs who know how to decode a problem with wisdom and deliver the perfect solution — even if they're not great at shouting.
The transition from the attention economy to the trust economy is perhaps the most important narrative shift of our time. Understanding it requires the tools of narrative engineering.
