Some of the most successful firms in the economy have adopted a digital platform model—an approach where two or more groups interact over a shared architecture to co-create value. Today, a new force is reshaping platform ecosystems: AI agents* that can search, negotiate, and transact on behalf of users are beginning to operate as platform participants in their own right. This changes the strategic calculus for platform design, pricing, and governance in fundamental ways.
In Platform Strategy: Designing for Humans and AI Agents, you will learn the core logic of multi-sided platforms—how to design the interactions they enable, how to attract participants to both sides, and how to capture value without undermining the ecosystem. You will also learn how to anticipate and respond to the arrival of AI agents on your platform, whether as complements to human participants or substitutes for them. Using cases and tools drawn from economics, market design, and competitive strategy, the course prepares you to make the platform decisions that matter most: what interaction to enable, whom to attract first, what to charge, and how to govern an ecosystem where humans and AI agents coexist.
*AI agents—systems that search, negotiate, and transact on behalf of users—are beginning to show up as participants on multi-sided platforms. This alters the challenges of platform design in fundamental ways. Agents can dramatically reduce search frictions, but they can also introduce new forms of congestion and strategic obfuscation. Agents can automate contracting and payment, thus lowering transaction costs, but they raise novel governance questions about trust, safety, and accountability that platform designers must address. This course examines how the fundamentals of platform strategy—coring, seeding, and tipping—must shift when one or more sides of the platform are populated by AI agents rather than (or alongside) human beings.
