- In today’s CEO Daily: Matthew Prince on how AI is changing the internet.
- The big leadership story: Shopify CEO calls out workers’ ‘slop grenades.’
- The markets: Up in Asia, down in Europe as stocks close out a mixed week.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune .
Good morning. Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince expected web traffic from automated bots and AI agents to surpass human traffic at the end of next year. Instead, it happened in May, with Cloudflare reporting almost 60% of requests to websites coming from bots. At that rate, he says, there could be 1,000 times as much automated traffic as human traffic in five years. Many are AI crawlers ingesting content to train models that may never send a reader (or a cent) back to the site. Prince wants to change that. “Companies need to get paid by the AI companies for what is the fuel that runs these AI systems,” he told me from his office in downtown New York at One World Trade. These are, after all, his customers.
