On the Datafication of Future AI Agents

The emergence of advanced AI agents represents a transformative socio-technical development, with leading technology companies positioning agentic AI as the next frontier of human–computer interaction. Crucially the same corporations driving this agenda have long been subject to scrutiny over datafication, data extraction, and monopolistic data governance. Yet, the data-intensive structural logic underlying future AI agents has received insufficient scholarly attention. This article addresses this gap by providing a political-economy analysis of how the developmental trajectory of AI agents is structurally embedded in the data ecosystems of Big Tech corporations, and of how this embeddedness may reinforce their data dominance. The article analyzes the adverse ethical implications that concentrated data power poses at both individual and collective levels, examines how the technical architecture of AI agents may exacerbate these challenges, and evaluates a set of mitigation strategies oriented toward more democratic and sustainable AI governance.