Everyone in venture capital is currently reading Jamin Ball’s latest Clouded Judgement on the shift from "Systems of Record" to "Systems of Action."
Jamin Ball
The thesis is clear: The next big winners won't be the individual AI agents (which are becoming commoditised) or the underlying models (which are fighting a price war). The winner will be the Platform that aggregates them into a unified "Do It For Me" layer.
He is right about the shift. But Silicon Valley is wrong about the architecture.
They are trying to build this "Platform of Platforms" using APIs. They should be building it on State.
API's are a trap
The current vision for the "Platform of Platforms" looks like this:
- You have a Marketing Agent (App A).
- You have a Billing Agent (App B).
- You have a Logistics Agent (App C).
- The "Platform" connects them via APIs so they can pass messages to each other.
This creates a Tower of Babel. Without a shared source of truth, these agents are just shouting JSON at each other. There is no guarantee that the "invoice" App B sent is the same "invoice" App C received. There is no audit trail. There is no settlement.
You haven't built a platform. You've built a distributed hallucination.
Shared state is the new integration layer
We argue that the true "Platform of Platforms" isn't an API Gateway. It is a Ledger.
In our Qi intelligent cooperating system, integration doesn't happen by passing messages. It happens by verifying state.
- The Marketing Agent doesn't "tell" the Billing Agent to send an invoice.
- The Marketing Agent updates the state of the Customer Contract to "Active."
- The Billing Agent observes this state change on the ledger and executes its task.
This subtle shift changes everything. It means that coordination is decoupled from communication. This is particularly relevant when working across departments, across organisations, and across entrenched enterprise applications.
Agents don't need to trust each other. They only need to trust the State.
IXO World
ICYMI: The State of Agents (Part 4/6) shifts the conversation from the technical (Architecture/Safety) to the financial (ROI/Business Value), directly addressing the "Pilot Purgatory" that most enterprises are currently experiencing.
How value really gets captured
Revenue models are shifting from "Access" (SaaS subscriptions) to "Outcome" (paying for results). This is the economic engine of the "Platform of Platforms."
But you cannot charge for an outcome if you cannot prove the outcome.
If your platform is just a bundle of APIs, "outcomes" are murky.
- "Did the agent really save us 20%?"
- "Did the campaign really drive those leads?"
In a State-Based Platform like Qi, the outcome is a cryptographic fact.
- The Carbon Credit was Retired.
- The Payment was Settled.
- The Claim was Verified.
This makes the "Outcome Economy" possible. It turns the "Platform of Platforms" from a messy marketplace into a Precision Economy.
How we have built Qi for intelligent cooperation
The next great software company won't be the one with the best chatbot. It will be the one that provides the Physics for the Platform of Platforms.
We are not building the agents. We are building the Ground they walk on.
While the rest of the market fights for the "User Interface," we are securing the State Interface. And in the long run, he who holds the State, holds the Platform.
In the final installment, Part 6, we will conclude with The Vision. We are moving beyond "Prediction." It is time to game the future.
