Big tech is ‘terrified’ of AI agents wiping out ad revenue, says Billions Network CEO
The legacy monetary and digital frameworks propping up the present web structure face an imminent, existential disaster.
Evin McMullen, co-founder and CEO of Billions Community, advised CoinDesk in an interview in the course of the Proof of Discuss convention in Paris that tech giants and international telcos are actively scrambling to take care of an impending collapse of their main income engine: show promoting.
As autonomous AI brokers exchange human-driven semantic search, the standard system of monetizing consumer eyeballs breaks down utterly, she added.
“They’re terrified—existentially threatened,” McMullen stated bluntly, describing the inner response of media and telecommunications conglomerates approaching her agency. “AI brokers haven’t got eyes.
They don’t seem to be swayed by the visible ornament on the perimeters of the primary physique of knowledge that they search. The curiosity is much less to find new surfaces to position show advertisements on, and extra of an existential query of how discovery occurs. Are we inverting the web?”
Throughout Consensus in Miami 2026, Cardano Founder Charles Hoskinson mirrored comparable ideas to specific how Massive Tech really feel about AI brokers.
“Amazon, Google, Fb, they’re fearful of the agentic revolution,” Hoskinson stated, including that they’re investing closely as a result of “all of their enterprise fashions are going to be disrupted.”
With the rise of AI brokers, software program can scrape a webpage, summarize content material and maintain the supply consumer inside a chatbot or automated workflow as an alternative of sending an individual again to the unique web site.
Additionally at Consensus Miami, Cloudflare Chief Technique Officer Stephanie Cohen stated that shift is breaking the web’s outdated enterprise mannequin, with non-human visitors now exceeding human engagement.
The core problem going through the trendy internet is not the technical sophistication of machine intelligence, however a whole absence of programmatic accountability. McMullen identified that greater than 51% of present on-line and onchain interactions are pushed by unidentified, unaccountable automated bots.
Scaling On-Chain Infrastructure to Legacy Techniques
Billions Community has quietly grown to assist the third-largest on-chain agent inhabitants on the web, trailing solely Binance and Base. In response to McMullen, the community’s open-source cryptographic libraries are already utilized by greater than 9,000 company and sovereign builders worldwide.
Within the company sector, Billions Community’s know-how infrastructure is utilized by platforms like TikTok, the monetary large HSBC, and the decentralized monitoring protocol DeBank. It additionally collaborates with India’s Ministry of Labor to safe credential entry for nationwide social safety applications, alongside a deployment with the Indian Railway system that protects the digital identities of over 1.2 million personnel.
