Sure they can - especially when conferences are designed to have an API.
And when more companies are run by an AI, they will absolutely have secret meetings to discuss a merger.
This sounds about as realistic as all of the crypto and blockchain people talking about distributed governance and such. The API part and agents pulling data is fine, I doubt they'd be running a business though, since something tells me that sort of thing is gatekept way more even from other people.
For a cool fictional portrayal of AI businesses, Altered Carbon touched upon it somewhat.
Show me syntax I'm impressed, show me how you manage your state and invariants and I'm horrified.
Unless you mean something like bioinformatics or another highly specialized field that isn't actually "software".
Most software is dime a dozen.
https://juliawolffenotes.home.blog/2019/08/28/robot-shell-co...
Not at all.
But I don't know that they would do any worse than an average human would in the exact same situations.
Get off social media and the world is suddenly less dystopian.
When you do that, you see something interesting. There are three things, the "three devils" as I heard one article call them, that are largely responsible for the perceived decline vs 20-30 years ago: the cost of housing, health care, and college tuition. Of those housing is the worst because it's the most universally unavoidable.
Ignore housing, health care, and college tuition, and think about it...
Individual wealth: vastly higher, especially if you include technological growth and what's possible today and what you can buy today for the same $$$.
Buying power: similar in many areas, slightly lower in energy but made up for by vast efficiency increases (e.g. I drive an EV that costs less than $10 to charge in my garage), slightly lower for groceries but a lot of that is self-inflicted. Vote, people.
Job availability: mixed, and very much depends on whether you compare to a recession period or a boom period.
Overall health: mixed.
Again, buying power, it would be less of an issue if wages kept up with inflation of the key products, aka housing. The largest item someone will buy is a home and that's reduced in quality.
The second most important thing for most people, is a job, and as I said, in most industries they have not matched with inflation. Therefore those today are working the same but earning a lot less for it. That is with or without a recession.
You may be able to theoretically consume more due to value decreasing of products but that's countered by the above. Likewise individual wealth, is just that, individual. Not everyone is doing better, most aren't, and we need a society where all are doing ok, rather than some doing great and some not.
(That EV costs more to begin with even with subsidies, and that disposable of the batteries are gigantic drain on resources. We still need to move to public transport.)