AI Agents Will Replace Software | Yat Siu on the Future of AI, Jobs & the Agent Economy

In this episode of Bitcoin.com News Interviews, Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, discusses the transformative potential of AI agents in reshaping software, work, and digital economies. He shares his firsthand experience building over 200 autonomous AI agents through Animoca Mines, highlighting how these agents can autonomously perform tasks—like updating contact databases, discovering sales opportunities, and even creating custom applications in minutes—without direct user prompting. Siu emphasizes that agents are not just assistants but evolving digital workforce members that learn from user interactions, clone themselves, and improve over time. He illustrates this with real examples, including an agent that generated €120,000 in art sales by predicting optimal networking moments at Art Basel and another that built a genealogy skill now shared across a decentralized knowledge pool, creating a self-improving, collaborative economy. Siu also explores the broader implications: agents will disrupt traditional software models, replace human intermediaries, and enable sovereign, on-chain digital identities and payments—especially relevant for Japan’s 2026 Digital Year initiative. He warns that while Japan lags in AI adoption, its urgent need for robotics and digital sovereignty could accelerate its leap into the agentic future, especially as LLMs become commoditized and cultural context becomes the new competitive edge.