This is no longer a story about the future. It already began on January 29, 2026.
Your company's AI agent boots up at 5 a.m. First, to gather the latest information on competitors, it automatically pays a data provider roughly ¥1 (about $0.007) and retrieves a report. Next, it accesses a legal database to check for relevant regulatory changes, paying a separate provider a few yen for the service.
It pulls market data, runs analysis, and executes trades. Over the course of this process, the AI agent makes dozens of payments to external services — all automatically, with no human approval required.
You arrive at the office at 9 a.m. By then, your AI agent has already been working for four hours.
This is not science fiction. As of April 21, 2026, roughly 69,000 AI agents were operating on the x40...
