The most valuable companies of the last two decades — Apple's App Store, Amazon Marketplace, Uber, Airbnb, Visa — produce almost none of what is bought and sold on them. What they do is design the interactions between two or more groups and capture part of the value those interactions create.
Something new is now arriving on these platforms: AI agents — software that searches, negotiates, and transacts on a user's behalf, increasingly without the user watching. When one side of a market is run by agents instead of people, the questions that have always defined platform strategy — who to admit, what to charge, how to keep the ecosystem honest — do not go away. Rather, they get harder, and perhaps even more interesting. Agents can strip out the cost of finding the right counterparty and the cost of closing a deal. They can also flood a market with noise, fake the signals it runs on, and break the mechanisms that keep participants safe.
Platform Strategy: Designing for Humans and AI Agents teaches the durable logic of multi-sided platforms as a structured playbook for design and decision-making — how platforms create value, to how they are “cored,” seeded, and monetized, through to how they must be governed as they scale, and how that logic shifts when agents join. Drawing on economics, market design, and competitive strategy, it prepares you to make the decisions that matter most: which interactions to enable, which side to attract first, what to charge, and how to govern a market where humans and agents do business side by side. AI runs through the whole program, and one of its four half-days is given over entirely to the agent era.
You will leave able to look at any platform — one you run, one you advise, or one you are about to compete with — and say where it is headed, and what to do about it.
