🦄 8.15.2025 - IDEs vs C-suites, AI Agents stress orgs, Intelligent Wallets, Unicorns, Web3 UX
Problem owners + solution owners + AI = the new authority. Everything else is just churn.
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Top insights for the coming week in 30 seconds
- 🚀 AI Agent Boom – Organizations are rapidly building generative AI agents thanks to leadership urgency for efficiency and new low-friction platforms; build times have shrunk from months → hours.
- ⏱️ Near-Term Stress #1 – Shortened dev cycles create operational headaches as support teams lose the prep time once built into longer delivery schedules.
- 🔄 Near-Term Stress #2 – AI-savvy builders attract work away from traditional business/product owners, causing role ambiguity and long-term ownership gaps.
- 🧠 Leadership Response – Upskill legacy teams, embed engineers with business users, and empower “problem owners + solution owners + AI” as the new authority.
- 🛠️ Long-Term Shift – AI-powered IDEs (e.g., Replit Agent, Layers) could evolve into enterprise platforms, combining build, support, marketing, and launch in one environment.
- 📅 Strategic Warning – Avoid committing to large 5–10-year platforms without stress-testing assumptions—business conditions will change dramatically by 2030.
- 💳 Intelligent Wallets – AI + crypto wallets will unify identity, payments, memberships, and onboarding, putting customers in control of their data and access.
- 🥇 First-Mover Advantage – Companies experimenting with intelligent wallets now will lead the next era of seamless, secure, personalized customer engagement.
[perspective]
🗺️ Near Term and Long Term Impacts of AI Agents
More and more orgs are building their own generative AI agents that answer questions or perform tasks in response to plain language requests.
2 Drivers behind widespread experimentation with AI Agents:
- Leadership urgency to adapt to the changing economy and business climate and find new efficiencies.
- New technology platforms that make it easier to build AI Agents.
The progression is exponential: in the past year the observed average time to build a working agent (for business need ...not entertainment) has gone from months->weeks->hours.
Let's unpack the near term and long term impacts of this rapid change. And then a bonus section: impacts that are closer than you think (Intelligent Wallets).
😰Near Term: Organizational Stress
The rapid emergence of AI Agents, and the way they get built is having a disorienting effect on organizations, and its important to understand the factors in play:
Org Stress Point #1: Shortened development cycles = more production support headaches: Whether its small teams using Replit Agent, or larger teams using enterprise solutions like Snowflake or Databricks, developers can now build AI Agents in just a few hours that previously would have taken weeks or months.
This is creates a problem:
Who is supposed to support all these new apps that are being generated on such short notice??
Think about the timing issue: previously new apps came with a longer delivery timeline that gave everyone time to:
- Arrange for operational support and
- Get the operational team familiar with the new apps or systems they were going to support.
That preparation buffer has all but disappeared.
Org Stress Point #2: Organizational dislocations & ambiguity: Teams or individuals who build working agents gain a reputation for rapid delivery/rapid value creation. This attracts attention and excitement naturally. As a result, work starts flowing to those who know how to create agents rather than the original departmental owners.
Traditional roles like "Business Owner" and "Product Manager" even "IT Owner" become marginalized. Once again, this runs into the issue: who is going to support these apps on an ongoing basis?
It's one thing to create an agent for yourself, or for 1-2 users that you work closely with. It's another thing altogether to create an agent that manages work on behalf of a departmental function of the company.
Thoughtful Change Leaders are finding ways to respond thoughtfully to these challenges:
- Find ways to upskill the "owning" teams so they stay in the game. This is hard. The realities of day to day operations support for legacy technologies can be so immersive. It's very easy for support teams to drift into less and less relevant/less performant tech capabilities over time. So we have to intentionally make opportunities for teams to learn new skills.
- Retrain leaders to think about combinations of humans and AI agents working together - agnostic to org structure. On the human side we want to see team members with deep engineering skills working side by side with business customers. This direct partnership is key.
- Why this works: value happens when we bring problem owners and solution owners together. Refuse to allow layers of hierarchy, departmental silos, anything to come between them. Why? Because they are the new Wayfinders, guiding the company to value.
- Reset expectations about where authority comes from. It does not come from titles or top layers. Problem owners + solution owners + AI = the new authority. Everything else is just churn.
📊 Long Term: Run your enterprise from an IDE?
Village Global’s recent discussion of the progression of AI in coding tools surfaced an early trend to watch: AI-powered Intelligent IDEs becoming the new enterprise platforms.
Glimpses of what's coming:
- The Replit Agent IDE not only includes direct control over all data sources, code and working apps, but also does a credible job providing customer support for an app being built. To see this in action, create an app, then ask questions about how that app works. Sometimes the agent answers the questions with helpful explanations, and sometimes the agent will say, "Actually I need to fix something," then fixes it and relaunches a new version. You can also ask it to generate user documentation - and it will.
- Layers is a new AI Agent that markets your app from within the IDE you're using to build it. It has direct access to the details of the app, so makes sense that it could be well positioned to market the app you're launching. Get Early Access here.
The speakers on the Village Global panel expect IDEs to eventually include other built in functions like the ability to launch a company, handle filings etc. In 2017, Jack Ma famously predicted a robot would be Time Magazine's CEO of the year in 30 years. IDEs populated by AI Agents offer a glimpse of how that might play out. Will Intelligent IDEs replace executive suites? We'll see.
Key takeaways:
- If the large mission critical platforms in your industry have a typical shelf life of 5-10 years, you want to be very thoughtful about what large platform implementations are being launched right now.
- The business environment in 2029 or 2035 will be nothing like today.
- Check your assumptions about what current processes will continue with incremental changes vs. those that will be massively disrupted - perhaps by one-person unicorn companies aka soloprenuers (already popping up).
AI and Finance are converging - watch the crypto / blockchain based architecture space. This is going to enable a different business and consumer marketplace populated and driven by Intelligent Wallets. Most of what we think of us mission critical enterprise platforms today will be useless.
📲Sooner than you think: Intelligent Wallets
Intelligent wallets—where AI meets crypto—are set to replace today’s jumble of apps, accounts, and IDs. From banking and insurance to loyalty programs and onboarding, these wallets will become the front door to every interaction - a single, secure hub controlled by the customer. Companies learning this now will own the next era of customer engagement.
Forward-thinking companies are already exploring how these wallets can streamline onboarding, transactions, and customer engagement.
What's driving this? If you step back, you see 2 larger trends:
- The convergence of AI and Crypto - as described in previous editions of S3T.
- The Crypto industry's focus on driving adoption through more accessible user experience.
Unicorn.eth is an example worth studying. The company has its roots in the Ethereum community where the founders pioneered a way to make onboarding, ticketing and other customer membership experiences simple and quick.
- The team ran ETHDenver one of the world’s largest crypto conferences entirely through digital wallets.
- Attendees used their wallets to pay for items, join events, and access services—all in one place.
- With traditional crypto wallets, set up was tricky and confusing, but new Unicorn.eth approach made onboarding quick and simple.
- They took the intimidating complexities associated with crypto wallets (gas fees, cryptic addresses, risk of sending funds to the wrong recipients etc), and found a way to handle them securely behind the scenes.
Unicorn.eth is now making that same simplified onboarding and membership experience available to any companies who needs to onboard and retain members. See the Unicorn walk-thru demo here (Youtube).
This same approach could work for industries like real estate, insurance, and banking—making customer sign-up, payments, and document access far smoother.
Add AI-powered assistants to these wallets, and they can offer personalized help, security, and convenience in real time. Intelligent Wallets will reside on phones, but expect expansion beyond phones— watches, wearables, and new devices. Watch for partnerships between crypto companies and hardware makers.
Before Intelligent Wallets
- Customers download multiple apps for banking, insurance, memberships, and events
- Data and logins are scattered across different accounts
- Onboarding for new services is slow and repetitive
- Payments, tickets, and IDs are stored in separate places
- Limited personalization—service providers hold most of the control
After Intelligent Wallets
- One secure wallet replaces many apps
- Customer controls their own data and access
- Onboarding is near-instant with reusable verified identity
- Payments, memberships, tickets, and IDs live in one place
- AI assistants in the wallet offer real-time, personalized help
Additional note: there are Corporate Wallets too. These are rule based wallets that require multiple designated individuals to sign off on decisions. These activities are audit trailed in an immutable blockchain. As AI capabilities are embedded in these wallets, expect to see corporate governance start to shift from boardrooms to on-chain via Intelligent Corporate Wallets.
Companies that start learning and experimenting with intelligent wallets today will have the edge in this next big shift in how customers handle their data and finances.
🏆 You just learned how to help your leaders and teams diagnose some of the key stressors impacting orgs right now, and understand the best ways to respond. You also got advance notice of upcoming changes you can help your teams and partners get ready for.
Opinions expressed are those of the individuals and do not reflect the official positions of companies or organizations those individuals may be affiliated with. Not financial, investment or legal advice, and no offers for securities or investment opportunities are intended. Mentions should not be construed as endorsements. Authors or guests may hold assets discussed or may have interests in companies mentioned.
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