Yes however unlike most games, Non-Player Characters (NPCs, or AI Characters) are consumers not producers. In other words, they will not normally introduce anything into the economy. There are some exceptions to the rule, starter faction epic missions for example. These special missions may give the player a faction specific item that may or may not have some specific purpose or value. 

Factions represent groups of player characters. Every new character will start in a starter faction. Starter factions are those factions mentioned in the story line. Factions may have smaller groups of characters called squads composed of faction members.  Every squad, having a sufficient number of members, will have the option to charter their own player owned faction (factions created by and controlled by players). 

Origins is stepping out of the norm by providing an extensive administration tool set never seen before in other MMO's including:

• Manage faction members
  Admission, Squad Formation, Ranks, Security Clearances, and more.
  
• Manage Faction Offices
  Organizational Chart, Member Assignment, Office Responsibilities, and more.
• Manage Faction Relationships with other Factions
  Political State, Privileges, Fees, and more.
• Faction Mission Management
  Create missions to progress your faction and members.
  

Origins will be the largest online universe ever created online for an MMO. It will employ concepts from other games and some concepts that have never been tried. Origins will be a mixture of Jumpgate/Allegiance/Eve all wrapped up into one. The flight model will be a psudo real space physics enviroment. The fighter type single pilot ships are flown in first person (Jumpgate, Privateer, Wing Commander, etc) while capital ships, and some economy type single pilot ships are flown in third person (Eve).

The Origins universe is massive. Matter of fact, the universe is so large that no one can fly across it in a real life time. It is not inconceivable that the game will never be fullyexplored. A players position in the game is: Quadrant; Sector in the Quadrant; Position in the Sector; or Q/S/P. Currently, a single sector is 500KM accross. Each quadrant is about 1 million sectors. There are 999 billion quadrants in the game. As you can see, the universe is quite massive.