ARK: AI agents could drive $8T in online commerce by 2030

ARK Invest projects that AI agents could enable $8 trillion in online consumer spending by 2030, according to its Big Ideas 2026 report. The firm estimates agent-driven transactions will rise from about 2% of digital spending in 2025 to nearly 25% by 2030.

The report forecasts AI-powered search will grow from roughly 10% of global search traffic in 2025 to 65% by 2030. ARK estimates AI-mediated consumer revenue will increase from around $20 billion today to nearly $900 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate of roughly 105%.

ARK projects AI-related search advertising will expand at about a 50% annual rate, with monetization trailing adoption by roughly two years. The firm links those advertising shifts to wider use of AI agents for shopping and other transactions.

Companies are building payments infrastructure to let autonomous agents pay for goods and services. On May 7, Amazon Web Services launched AgentCore Payments, a service that lets AI agents access and pay for APIs, web content and compute resources instantly.

Brian Foster, Coinbase’s head of infrastructure growth and strategy, wrote in a statement: “There will soon be more AI agents transacting than humans, and they need money that’s built for the internet – programmable, always on, and global. By bringing Coinbase’s stablecoin infrastructure and x402 into AWS AgentCore, we’re giving developers the full stack to build agents that move money at software speed, with the trust and compliance enterprises expect.”

Other firms are introducing complementary products. The Solana Foundation and Google Cloud unveiled Pay.sh, a marketplace to enable stablecoin payments on the Solana network. Anchorage Digital launched Agentic Banking to provide custody and payment rails for autonomous software.

Companies involved in these projects say stablecoins and blockchain networks can offer global, always-on payment rails that integrate with software through APIs and smart contracts, allowing agents to transact without human intervention.

ARK notes its forecast rests on several assumptions: rapid consumer acceptance of agent-based shopping, broad adoption of programmable payment rails and continued investment by major cloud and crypto firms. The report says secure custody, compliance tooling and integration with enterprise systems are needed to support automated payments and inter-agent commerce.