We are at an inflection point. I did something amazing today. Having played around with Muse, Meta’s AI agent over the past couple of days, cautiously probing its capabilities, I asked it to give me book recommendations based on my preferences and to then go one step further. Check their availability on Libby and check one out. To my amazement, It did it, I saw it control a browser within the app. This was the browser in its virtual machine and I gave it the libby credentials that it stored in its secure vault.
I was able to repeat the experiment with higher friction & more coaxing using Hermes the open source agentic harness that I run on an old MacBook pro with Gemini-3.8 Flash made by Google which comes with a computer use model. It was somewhat patchy but did the job with some token spend. Muse was the clear winner with frictionless usage beating friction every single time in terms of what I had to ask it and the interventions I had to make.
Not everyone shares my excitement. Amazon recently blocked muse from accessing it. To me, this is an information provider getting in the way of a customer convenience. Why would I want to go to Amazon if an agent can simply buy the OralB toothbrush that I want. It’s clearly a case of misaligned incentives. A retailer or information provider is incentivized to cross sell, upsell or show an advertisement to you. They lose this opportunity when an AI agent acts on your behalf. They probably wouldn’t mind if you had a personal concierge buying on your behalf, a privilege reserved for the rich. However when hundreds of millions of customers stop visiting your site. That threatens your business model. The internet as we know it needs to be fundamentally rebuilt. Websites have been used for decades as the Internet’s user interface for humans. Why visit a website when all you need is an agent to get the news you want, book flight tickets, checkout a library book, see your spending in real time or anything else that can be done with a computer.
Imagine never having to remember a password, filling out a long and confusing government form or refreshing any of the travel aggregators in the middle of the week to score a cheaper flight ticket. Imagine never having to check in for a flight manually and simply showing up to the Airport. This is the beginning of a frictionless world & there will be so much time given back to humanity. The thought makes me giddy. Human laziness will win. The need to visit a website or an app will decline. This flip will not happen in the next month, However I predict in the next few years, the current way of accessing the web will be viewed as archaic.
What we need is data in a format that Agents understand & tool call availability to perform actions on behalf of a user universally on the web. We do have it somewhat via APIs or MCPs. There are already trends towards the transition to the Agentic Web, with cloudflare and Stripe enabling agentic payments & related protocols. But my sense is, that a new protocol needs to be built out & websites that exist today will be augmented by that.
The new protocol will need to take care of the sellers incentives too, e.g when I ask my agent for the Oral B toothbrush, the protocol from the Seller would send my agent the cross sell information in a way the two parties agree. Will it be simply seeing a website within the agent? That in my humble opinion would be going backwards. There will be some Agent – Provider negotiations to figure out what this would be. There’s an opportunity to create an industry standard here as not doing so would be a whack a mole battle between Agents and information providers.
How could these negotiations play out? My hypothesis is large companies with enormous balance sheets will dominate here. This is due to compute costs & access to distribution. So it is really the large information providers interacting with large agentic companies who would set the terms initially. This is different than the open web where anyone could set up a website and have their place on the internet and be discovered by Search engines. The Agents would be what Google & others have been over the past two decades, the portal to all of human and now machine generated knowledge What would an open agentic web look like? What would discovery of a product or a person within that look like?
This is an amazing time to imagine and build. Long live the human web it was good while it lasted. Here’s to the new era of the Agentic web. May the best Agent win. But most of all may humans win.
