a16z Proposes B2A Economy as AI Agents Become Primary Internet Users

On November 12, 2026, the Chinese tech outlet ZhiDongXi published a translation of a piece originally published on the a16z website titled "Welcome to the B2A Economy". a16z, a well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firm, sets out a new claim in the article: AI Agents are becoming the primary users of the internet, and businesses will increasingly need to compete not only for human consumers but also for the traffic and orders that AI Agents bring in. The firm names this commercial model B2A, short for Business-to-Agent, meaning an economy in which companies sell directly to agents rather than only to people.

According to the article, internet companies spent the past few decades trying to keep bots away from their sites, but they may now find themselves competing for bot business instead. The piece asserts that AI Agents already account for the majority of internet traffic, have written more than half of all newly published web articles, and produce most of the code that goes into production. As Agents shift from answering questions to carrying out tasks, they are also expected to play a growing role in deciding which products humans purchase, which services they subscribe to, and where their money goes.

To back this up, the article cites two sets of figures. E-commerce platform Shopify disclosed that in Q1 2026, traffic to its stores coming from AI rose 8x year over year, while orders originating from AI search grew nearly 13x year over year. Cybersecurity firm Human Security also found that Agent browser traffic increased 8x between August and October of this year. The material available covers only this single article, and no subsequent developments or reactions from other parties are included.