In 1995, the dot com boom began. This was a period of immense wealth creation, with the founding of companies like Amazon, eBay and Google.

30 Years Later, 2025 feels like it will be the year in which the AI Agent boom began. Don’t take my word for it, hang out on Tech YouTube and you will hear this sentiment from Y-Combinator, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Dhamesh Shah… I’ll spare you the exhaustive list.

AI Agents will completely revolutionise how we live our lives, how we run businesses and will be a massive wealth creator. So how do we position the Australian tech scene to take advantage of this impending tidal wave.

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Don’t know what AI Agents are? Click here.

The TLDR of this opinion piece is Australia should be proactive in building, investing in, learning about and adopting AI agent technology so we are not left behind by the US.

While there will be a range of infrastructure providers like Open AI (foundational models) and Relevance AI (builders), but the biggest area where there will be immense opportunity is vertical AI agents.

These are AI agents designed to solve problems for industries or business functions. Take Julian Bright’s AI Agent HR-Tech Startup, Fairgo, the moment someone applies for a job, it sends an email to the candidate, books in a screening interview with said candidate, interviews the candidate and writes reports and recommendations of who should go to the next round.

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In 2035, businesses will comprise of an AI agents human workforce mix carrying out business operations. Ideally, a decent portion of these AI agents companies are Australian-founded and owned.

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We need to see the opportunity

In our daily work, we should have a mindset of identifying inefficiencies and pain points in business operations, asking ourselves: Could an AI agent streamline or automate this process? The truth is, outside the tech bubble, many people don’t naturally think about identifying pain points and launching startups. However, the more AI agents become part of everyday conversations and solutions, the more likely industry insiders are to spot opportunities for innovation.

Australia is strong across many industries like mining, construction, hospitality, and agriculture—these are sectors ripe for transformation through AI agents.

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We need to fund and support these opportunities

Startups often fail not because an idea lacks merit, but because turning an idea into a successful company is a monumental challenge. Take for example a civil engineer who identifies a problem with managing geo-engineering data across construction sites and wants to develop a solution. She is now faced with the behemoth challenge of executing across marketing, sales, operations, capital raising, UX design and development.

Building great AI agent companies is inherently a collaborative effort. It takes a thriving ecosystem of co-founders, development agencies, accelerators, angel investors, and venture capitalists to bring these startups to life and scale. The more we focus our startup ecosystem on AI agent opportunities, the better equipped we’ll be to transform these ideas into successful ventures.

For development agencies, this means going deep—mastering how to build exceptional AI agent technology, understanding which foundational models best suit specific use cases, and understanding how different programming languages or no-code tools work with these models.

For accelerators, VCs, and government programs, the challenge is clear: how many AI agent startups are we supporting, educating the public about, and investing in? The more intentional we are in these efforts, the more we can ensure Australia doesn’t just follow the AI revolution but leads it.

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Let’s get behind Relevance AI

Relevance AI is one of the top companies today for if you want to get started in building some AI agent workflows to automate your business processes. And it can be used in a tech stack to build AI Agent MVPs.

And some great news, they are an Australian company. The more we can get behind them by using their product the more likely they will be one of the major players when AI agent adoption explodes.

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Mayfly Ventures Approach to AI agents

We will be working with Relevance AI to run educational programs to educate Australians on how to use AI agents to build startups and run businesses. We are also building plugins to allow developers on no code platforms such as Bubble.io and Flutterflow to seamlessly use Relevance AI when developing AI agent startups.

We are spinning up a few AI Agent tools in-house which will streamline the adoption of AI agents for both startups and businesses.

Watch this space for the above.

And, we are actively looking for industry insiders who see AI agent opportunities within their industry. If this is you, let’s talk about how we can be your venture-building partner to bring this to life.

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