Two Economies, Not One- A Taxonomy of the Agentic Economy and the Case for Settlement Neutrality

The term agentic economy appears in over fty distinct denitions published between2021 and March 2026 by Microsoft Research, Sequoia Capital, the Bank for InternationalSettlements, Coinbase, Stripe, the World Economic Forum, Gartner, Fetch.ai, and at leastforty other sources. They do not mean the same thing. Some describe an AI agent buyinga plane ticket for its owner through Visa. Others describe autonomous software agentsnegotiating, transacting, and building reputation with each other no human in the loop,no credit card, no chargeback.This paper surveys the denitional landscape, classies fty-plus usages into ve cate-gories, and identies two fault lines that the literature has not made explicit. The rstthe…