Live from Money 20/20 in Riyadh. AI agents are starting to act on our behalf — that is a reality. More of the financial world is becoming tokenised and programmable. Doctor Efi Pylarinou calls this convergence the agentic economy meets the tokenised world. What does that actually mean for the future of money, markets, and financial institutions? Joining me is Doctor Efi Pylarinou, Founder of GrowFin. Doctor Efi, it is a pleasure having you with us.
Thank you for having me.
Why do you see the agentic economy and the tokenised world as two parts of the same transformation? And why is that convergence happening right now?
I really see them as inseparable. Although when you look at the innovators in the market, you will probably find companies only focused on agents or only focused on tokenising real world assets. But they are inseparable. Because if you think of it, we are trying to build an intelligent economy using these technologies — and there is no way we can have an intelligent economy unless we break the silos of the past. Look at the market. The industry classifications we are used to no longer hold. If you look within a business, the silos that we are used to no longer hold. Agents and cryptography are changing the world. We have to look at them in the same fashion — whether it is payments or capital markets.
You co-authored a chapter called Thinking Like an AI Native. When you talk about an AI native economy, how is it fundamentally different from the economy we have today, simply adopting more AI?
That is a distinction that is often confusing. We moved from traditional businesses to what we call digital businesses — really focused on deploying cloud and mobile and creating the experience economy. Now we have two technologies: AI and blockchain. Blockchain wanted to create DAOs — decentralised autonomous organisations — that has not fully happened. AI is aiming to create intelligence. I believe the convergence of those is going to create the intelligent economy. What does that look like? We need to look across customers, the enterprise itself, and the ecosystem — suppliers, partners — and use both technologies not only for discovery, which is what we are doing now, but also to design customer journeys and provide intelligence as a service. We are far from that. But that is the North Star.
What could an autonomous agent do with tokenised assets that would be difficult or impossible in today's financial system?
When we look at tokenised assets — real world assets — tokenisation allows us to move them more efficiently, split them, use them as collateral. But what we have not yet built is a truly new business model that is intelligent. If we compare with the digital economy, we built the sharing economy, the Ubers, social media, TikTok, super apps like WeChat. But with tokenisation and agents, we have not yet built something genuinely new. I am looking forward to seeing what we build at the convergence of those two.
On-chain tokenised real world assets reached a record $35 billion at the end of August. Are we seeing genuine economic demand or are we still largely tokenising assets and waiting for compelling use cases?
We are advancing, but it is still fragmented. We have not interconnected everything. Everything is about interoperability. We need to interconnect tokenised cash — whatever form that takes — with assets, whether real world assets or new types like tokenised IP or tokenised software. Once we start interconnecting them, we can place agents to make decisions. That is where we will eventually be able to link the real economy with the financial economy — because right now they are still separate. Can we eliminate some of the bottlenecks between the real economy and financial capital through tokenisation and agents? We are far from that. But we are building the primitives. The tokens are the primitives. The AI agents are the primitives. We are waiting to build on top of them.
If agents can hold money, purchase assets, and move capital autonomously, where does that leave banks?
The industry boundaries are blurring. Some financial services are getting detached from banks — look at payments, where payment providers command a large market share. Maybe one day payments will be completely detached from banks. Banks will remain — because of regulation, because of the trust that retail and business customers need. But what that means is that for banks, the competitive landscape is much broader than it used to be. Capital markets, payments — all these areas are converging, with overlapping players eating the lunch of others. Rethinking what the competitive landscape looks like is necessary for banking as much as it is for many other industries.
Thank you very much Doctor Efi for joining us. It was a pleasure.
Thank you very much for having me. Pleasure.
