Editor’s note: Our special “Friends and Family” offer for John Pangere’s Strategic Trader is closing this week. This will be the last Jolt we’ll be mentioning it in.

Right now, you can get $2,000 off John’s premium warrants advisory, where he’s helped members capture gains as high as 4,942%. If you’ve been curious about his approach, now’s the time to take a closer look.   

***

I want to thank everyone who reached out asking for an invite to Instinct, the artificial intelligence (AI) agent I've been using.

It was great to see so many of you excited to try it for yourselves. We received more requests than we had invites available. I'm sorry we couldn't give one to everyone. But I think you're right to be excited.

For three years, AI told us how to do things. Now, it does those things for us.

I now spend more than five hours a day working with AI agents, mainly Claude Code and Instinct. They’re becoming my digital assistants, researchers, and errand runners. And they’re doing useful work that wasn’t possible with a chatbot.

For example, I had 245 browser tabs open from months of articles I’d been meaning to read. Claude Code went through 84 of them, wrote a summary of each one, pulled together 58 charts, and closed the tabs it was finished with. Along the way, it spotted a top chip research firm contradicting its own tables.

Every Monday, another agent checks the portfolio pages of 26 venture capital funds for promising tech companies we might have overlooked. On its first run, it sifted through 2,120 holdings and flagged 353 for us to look into. 

And we're only scratching the surface. I believe AI agents will unleash a new wave of demand for computing power. They’ll also create a whole new set of winners for investors.

• This is the third “Big Bang” of the AI era.

The first was ChatGPT in November 2022: AI that talks. Suddenly, anyone could ask a question and get an intelligent answer.

The second came with reasoning models in September 2024: AI that thinks before it answers. Instead of immediately responding, these models work through hard problems step by step.

Now comes the third wave: AI agents that can do work for you. That may sound like a small difference, but the numbers say otherwise.

AI work is measured in “tokens,” or small chunks of text a model reads and writes. A typical chatbot exchange in 2023 used fewer than 2,000 tokens. A reasoning model uses about 7,600 tokens to answer one difficult question.

Researchers at Stanford, MIT, and the University of Michigan found that an agent fixing one software bug uses about 4.2 million tokens. That’s more than 2,000X the tokens used in a typical chat response from 2023.

Sources: OpenRouter, a16z

But the biggest change is that agents remove the human ceiling.

Chatbots only work while we’re typing questions and reading answers. Agents can work while we sleep. They can run in parallel. One person can put five or 50 of them to work at once.

We’ve seen this kind of shift before. Early on, people mostly used electricity for light. Then came appliances that could do jobs for us throughout the day.

Chatbots are AI’s light bulbs. Agents are its appliances.

• This makes me even more bullish on AI.

Agents are both hungrier for computing power and more useful to the people paying for it. I can see the first part in my own usage.

In August, my Claude Code agents processed 4.5 billion tokens. In September, they processed 8.1 billion. In the first 12 days of October alone, they had already processed another 8.3 billion tokens.

Source: Claude Code

My AI workload is roughly doubling every month.

And I’m hardly alone. OpenRouter, a marketplace that connects applications to AI models, estimates that agents overtook humans in token usage on its platform in February. By August, agents were using nearly 5X as many tokens as people.

More jobs, longer jobs, and agents working around the clock mean more demand for AI infrastructure like chips, memory, networking, and electricity. We already own several stocks benefiting from this trend in Disruption Investor and Disruption_X.

• But agents will also create a whole new class of winners.

People will pay for work that actually gets done. A chatbot can explain how to resolve a customer complaint. An agent can look up the order, check the refund policy, process the refund, and tell the customer the task has been handled.

That opens up a much bigger market. For years, companies have paid for software that helps their employees get work done. Now, with AI agents, they can pay for software that actually does the work itself.

This changes the investing opportunity.

In the past, the easiest way to profit from AI has been to own the companies building out the infrastructure. Those businesses still have enormous opportunities ahead of them.

But agents are pushing demand into new corners of the tech stack. They need regular processors to run software, high-speed connections to move data, and tools to access information securely.

As agents start doing real work inside businesses, the companies that control essential data, workflows, and customer relationships could become much more valuable. Others may find their business models under pressure.

That’s why understanding how these agents work matters so much to investors. We need to know where the new bottlenecks are forming, which companies can charge for solving them, and which businesses risk getting left behind.

That’s where we’re focusing our research next. I’ll be sharing the opportunities we uncover along the way. Stay tuned.

Stephen McBride

Chief Analyst, RiskHedge

PS: My colleague John Pangere specializes in stock warrants, which let you bet on a company’s success for a fraction of the cost of buying its shares… with the potential for much bigger gains.

In Strategic Trader, John shares his favorite warrants opportunities, along with his full portfolio, research, and guidance on when to buy and sell. He’s also put together a report with four warrants to buy now if you’re just starting out.

John’s running a “Friends and Family” discount for new Strategic Trader members, but the invitation is closing this week. So if you’ve been meaning to check out his service, I’d do it now. Get the details here.