I Am Done Using Your UI

I am done using your user interface. AI will use your product on my behalf, and if your business has an agent-friendly interface, then you will be at an enormous advantage over the next decade.

I recently rented a car for a trip abroad. My AI agent found eight car rental companies and was able to automatically generate quotes for five of them. The other three blocked the non-human traffic, and since I was now being forced to go through the Herculean effort of fumbling around their websites, I just didn’t bother.

ChatGPT and Claude are morphing into personal assistants, and a growing list of Jarvis-style AI agents like Muse (Meta), Dot (OpenAI), Duet (Anthropic), Grokbot (X), Copilot (Microsoft), Gemini (Google), and Instinct are vying to be your new gateway to much of the internet. Many of these companies have fought this battle before. Their market capture of browsers, search engines, and operating systems laid the foundations for multitrillion-dollar empires.

The trend has already been playing out in the professional world over the last couple of years. Companies that have been building their products with agents in mind are eating market share from incumbents. You can see this with the enormous success of those who took an early and aggressive stance towards AI-native SaaS, like Attio (“Adding LLM features to legacy architectures isn’t enough”) and Linear (“Agents are first-class users”).

There are still times when a user interface makes sense. Information-dense visualisations and dashboards are unlikely to be replaced by chat, although the major AI labs are increasingly pulling these into chat sessions. And there are kinds of work where I don’t want AI involvement, like communicating with my fellow humans in my own words.

Many businesses have embedded their own home-grown chat assistants in their websites; however, these are often frustrating user experiences. These limited chatbots are missing the important personal context that helps them operate on their users’ behalf. Customers won’t want to repeat their travel plans, explain their allergies, or retype their home address for every chatbot. Their own agents will already have this information and will take the path of least resistance to a purchase, whether from your business or a competitor’s.

Businesses will need to find a delicate balance between welcoming legitimate bot traffic and blocking malicious activity. Standards are emerging like Universal Commerce Protocol and Personal Agent Protocol to make this easier, and having a web presence accessible to agents will become table stakes.

Walmart just launched a way to shop using your own personal assistants rather than through their own website, and Shopify have made every storefront “agent-ready by default”. This is against the backdrop of Google’s recent earnings report, which showed a slowdown in revenue growth from search advertising, signalling a turn in the tide of how we interact with the web. Agents are here and they’re banging on your door trying to give you money. Let them in.

Walmart just launched a way to shop using your own personal assistants rather than through their own website and Shopify have made every storefront “agent-ready by default”. This is against the backdrop of Google’s recent earnings report when they announced a slowdown in revenue growth from search advertising, signalling a turn in the tide of how we interact with the web. Agents are here and they’re banging on your door trying to give you money. Let them in.