The biggest AI mistake companies make is jumping to implementation before understanding their own operations. Know where work is stuck before you try to automate it.
AI employees will not be optional. The companies that figure out how to hire, brief and manage digital workers alongside human teams will simply outpace the ones that do not.
If agents can inspect parts of a business continuously, the audit stops being a one-off report.
It becomes a living view of where work is stuck, where costs are rising and what is worth fixing next.
Most AI talk starts inside the company: tools, models, workflows, efficiency.
The better question is external.
What changes for the customer when a business can respond, decide and adapt much faster than before?
The AI shift will be faster than most companies are planning for.
The winners will not be the companies with the most AI tools.
They will be the ones that redesign how work, data and decisions move through the business.
The first question is not “where can we use AI?”
It is “which workflows are costing us the most time or money?”
Once that is clear, AI becomes one possible fix instead of a vague strategy.
AI does not fix messy data. It just moves the mess faster.
Before adding agents or automations, companies need to know where their data lives, who owns it and whether it can be trusted.
Most businesses do not need someone to “build AI” on day one.
They need to understand where work is stuck, where money is leaking and what is worth fixing first.
That is the real job of an AI audit.
Brian is right: "pivot to AI" is scarcity thinking.
Agents need internet-native money, identity and verification rails.
Crypto devs have spent years building autonomous adversarial, always-on systems. Maps surprisingly well to building agentic AI...
"If you're in crypto, pivot to AI."
I used to hear versions of this, and it's the wrong way to think about the world. It's zero sum, scarcity thinking.
Crypto is a general purpose technology. It's infrastructure, the same way electricity or the internet is infrastructure. It doesn't compete with the next big thing, because it underpins it. It's an *and*, not an *or*.
AI being a megatrend takes nothing away from crypto. If anything, it makes crypto more important.
AI agents will need their own financial infrastructure and will eventually transact far more per day than all humans combined. They can't open a bank account, they can't wait three days for a wire, they reside in one country. They need real time programmable money (and that's crypto).
Agents will need to hold funds and pay for things on their own. We pioneered this with the x402 protocol, Base, and USDC, which now power the vast majority of all agentic payments. Agents will also engage in trading and act as a financial advisor. They will raise or borrow money for new projects they are undertaking. They will eliminate tasks for us around tax planning, portfolio rebalancing, and bill pay.
Welcome to the world of Agentic Finance (AiFi). This is what Coinbase is building.
Our new websites are live:
- Persistence helps you build the company AI makes possible.
- https://t.co/F0L1dCMSKM shows you where to start.
https://t.co/HLNcJpl3gQ
https://t.co/pLnknIi1aK
What’d be your pitch to Bitcoiners on why BTC even needs DeFi built on it?
Persistence One CEO, @dneorej pointed out that idle BTC isn’t productive. Outside of gold and silver, the world’s biggest assets are productive ones, constantly building, compounding, and creating value.
📢 Hurry up: The $XPRT Trading Contest on @cedehub ends in 3 days.
Only a few epochs left to make the most... ⏳
1️⃣ Trade using the new "Autopilot" feature
2️⃣ Set your preferences
3️⃣ Sit back while you climb the leaderboard
Participate here 👉 https://t.co/P5KYjRwYBJ