It's not too far fetched to imagine A.I. subsidized corporations competing against each other in an open marketplace.
Really... you wondered if one of the great minds of history overlooked the simplest of things?
Already in The German Ideology (1845) he specifically made the point that the productivity increases inherent in a capitalist economic system was a prerequisite for a successful socialist revolution as otherwise redistribution would just make want common, and the same class struggles would start all over again as people fight to get out of poverty (like what happened in the Soviet Union, China, where the party organisations became the new upper class).
In the Communist Manifesto he and Engels spelled out how they saw capitalist productivity increases eventually lead to over-production and under-employment, and that this, according to Marx, is what will eventually lead to an intensification of class struggle and finally enable a socialist revolution as economic productivity under capitalism reaches its peak.
> The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones.
"Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth."