Agents as Infrastructure: The Two-Pillar Play

Agents are the next infrastructure wave, and the companies that win it will be the ones that own both pillars — the data moat AND the agent infrastructure that runs on top. Either alone makes you a strong player. Both is what makes you the next 10x winner. In this episode I walk through: - Why agents will mirror the cloud era — AWS-style infra players and Heroku-style high-end-of-stack players, with a squeezed middle - Why "inference is the new compute bill" changes the SaaS scaling math - How vertical integration compounds quality and UX, the Apple way - What "owning agents" actually means (hint: not building a frontier model) - The two pillars — data and agent infra — and why owning both is the 10x play Read the post: https://coreyja.com/podcast/agents-as-infrastructure ⏱ Chapters 00:00 Cold open + the two-pillar thesis 01:30 Why agents mirror the cloud — AWS vs Heroku, the squeezed middle 04:00 Vertical integration — cost and inference as the new compute bill 07:30 Quality + UX — the Apple analogy 10:30 Why owning both pillars closes the loop 13:00 Not about building a frontier model 15:00 Where I think this lands — what I'm watching 17:00 Sign-off 🔗 Links - Blog: https://coreyja.com - Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/coreyja.com - GitHub: https://github.com/coreyja - Mull: https://mull.sh - Email: podcast@coreyja.com 🎧 Listen - Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and everywhere else: search "coreyja.fm" - Or grab the RSS / direct audio at https://coreyja.com/podcast #AI #Agents #Infrastructure #VerticalIntegration #SoftwareEngineering