Agentic AI is the AI industry’s buzzword of the moment. The companies developing it and its numerous fans on Wall Street claim that AI agents will become so popular and commonplace among users that they will eventually take over the entire economy and disrupt the business models of most industries. Spotify executives think their platform will be fine, because they are building the platform to be used in equal measure by both humans and AI agents.
“We think Spotify is unusually well positioned for the age of agentic AI,” Spotify’s co-CEO Gustav Söderström said in the company’s earnings call on Thursday morning.
There are several reasons why that’s the case, Söderström said, but the most significant is that Spotify wants AI agents to serve as another way for listeners to access its platform without giving up its direct relationship with consumers. For example, a user could ask an AI assistant to create a playlist for a run based on their listening history, but Spotify’s own systems would handle the request and provide the music, even if the request originated with another company’s AI assistant.
Söderström’s argument is that Spotify can benefit from the rise of AI agents without giving up its direct relationship with consumers. The company has built its own AI agent that can communicate with third-party assistants, allowing users to request music, podcasts, and audiobooks through those services while Spotify handles recommendations and playback.
Another use case is AI-generated podcasts. Some AI assistants can already create personalized podcast episodes based on user inquiries, whether that’s summarizing class notes for an upcoming exam or catching up on the day’s news. Spotify already allows compatible AI agents to save those episodes privately to users’ libraries, and Söderström wants to expand that integration.
“So our goal is to be the media service that you use from any agent, really turning the growth of agents into a tailwind rather than a headwind,” Söderström said. “And that’s exactly what we’re seeing now. We’re seeing really good adoption of Spotify inside these agents.”
Spotify has inked deals to integrate its services into both OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Last month, it also announced a partnership with Meta’s buzzy new AI agent Muse, promoting use cases like AI agents making playlists for you based on specific daily routines you got going on.
Agentic AI products promise a superconnected digital experience where a user’s experience in one corner of the internet is carried over to another by an AI agent. Regardless of how appealing that level of interconnectedness might sound to some users, it also helps these companies keep reportedly very detailed files on users and raises significant data privacy and security concerns. That was one of the reasons why Amazon said that it blocked Meta’s Muse agents from shopping on its platform.
Söderström assured investors that Spotify would not share its proprietary user data with third-party AI agents. Instead, the agents bring requests to Spotify’s own AI systems, which will “do the reasoning over everything we know about you and then decide what to play for you.” But those requests could also reveal information about users’ interests that Spotify wouldn’t otherwise have known, giving the company an even more detailed picture of its listeners.
“Now, what happened there is actually we learn more about you…we know things that we wouldn’t have known otherwise about your interests,” Söderström said. “So this is actually a positive data loop for Spotify rather than the other way around.”
While connecting their platform to AI agents, Spotify is also trying to add more AI features into its own platform. That bet has included interactive features like a ChatGPT-like assistant and a yet-to-be-released paid add-on for creating AI-generated covers and remixes.
“On our fourth quarter call back in February, I said that we were building the world’s first truly intelligent agentic media platform. That may have sounded a little bit abstract at the time, but it’s hopefully becoming clearer now,” Söderström said. “What we meant was an intelligent media service encapsulated as an agent, whether you use it directly on our application or via another agent.”
Unlike services that perform tasks AI agents might eventually automate away, Spotify is betting that people will still want to consume music and other entertainment themselves, even if AI assistants increasingly decide what they listen to.
