Evin McMullen, co-founder and CEO of Billions Network, said that AI agents are increasingly taking over the task of crawling, organizing, and summarizing web page content, putting more pressure on the traditional internet model that relies on display advertising for revenue, and prompting technology platforms and telecommunications companies to re-evaluate how they distribute traffic.

Non-human traffic continues to rise

In an interview with CoinDesk during the Proof of Talk conference in Paris, McMullen said that the change is not just happening at the search entry point, but more importantly, in the way content is discovered. In the past, users entered websites through searches and clicks, giving ads the opportunity to be displayed; now, content may be directly extracted by AI agents and left in chatbots or automated processes, and users no longer need to return to the original webpage.

She believes this will diminish the value of traditional web page advertising because AI agents don't browse page visual elements like human users. The report also mentions that Cloudflare's Chief Strategy Officer, Stephanie Cohen, previously stated that non-human traffic on the internet has surpassed human interaction, disrupting old business models.

Accountability becomes a new issue

McMullen stated that currently, over 51% of online and on-chain interactions are driven by unidentifiable and unaccountable automated bots. She believes that the core problem facing the internet today is not the rapid advancement of machine capabilities, but the lack of a programmable and verifiable accountability mechanism.

In her view, if AI agents continue to be the primary information gateway, internet platforms will not only have to deal with traffic loss, but also solve problems such as identity verification, behavior attribution, and access permissions. This also increases the demand for identity and verification infrastructure for AI agents.

Billions Network expands corporate partnerships

McMullen stated that Billions Network is driving the development of on-chain infrastructure for AI agents, with a focus on enhancing authentication and accountability through cryptographic tools. She noted that the network currently supports the third-largest number of on-chain agents, after Binance and Base.

According to her, the company's open-source encryption library has been adopted by over 9,000 enterprises and sovereign developers worldwide, including TikTok, HSBC, DeBank, and related projects with the Indian government. She also mentioned that the company is collaborating with the Indian Ministry of Labour to protect credential access to social security programs and has deployed a digital identity protection solution in the Indian Railways system, covering over 1.2 million people.