the best distribution channel for AI launched 14 years ago

iMessage is an app people have used every day for over a decade. Your friends are in there, your family, your group chats. With over 1.5 billion active iPhones worldwide, it is reasonable to estimate more than a billion people use iMessage every month.

At the same time, every AI company is competing for attention on your phone. Texting is the lowest possible barrier to entry. My mom refuses to use email and doesn't own a computer, but she texts every day. Texting an agent is the first time I've seen her use AI on her own

Now consider what happens when hundreds of millions of people are texting agents, across an ecosystem with millions of agents to choose from. For scale, the App Store hosts roughly 2 million apps today.

The average person sends somewhere around 40 messages a day. If even a quarter of that volume shifts toward agents, that implies billions of messages to AI every single day, more AI conversations than every standalone chatbot app combined, happening inside a channel nobody had to download.

An average week starts to look like this. Monday, your agent checks you into a flight and moves your dinner reservation when it lands late. Tuesday, it chases the refund you forgot about. Wednesday, it negotiates the group trip in the chat while everyone's at work. By Friday it's booked the weekend, split the costs, and texted your mom that you land at 6.

All of that is commerce. Transactions, bookings, refunds, and tasks, all moving through one thread. There is precedent for this: WeChat is the dominant messaging channel in China, and its ecosystem of mini apps moves hundreds of billions of dollars in payments every year.

Agents in iMessage exceed what super apps can offer because natural language removes the constraint that defines them. A mini app can only do what its menus expose. An agent can be asked for anything, and its capabilities grow with the underlying models rather than with any interface.

And unlike WeChat, this channel is already installed for every one of the 1.5 billion people with an iPhone.

If even a fraction of commerce moves into conversation, the spend flowing through messaging will be measured in the hundreds of billions. It's still very, very early everyone.