Agentic Web

"If we use AI to automate talking to humans, we'll make AI to respond to the AI calling us. So then we've made an API amongst humans." - @Suhail

I was thinking about how we'll interact with the Internet in the future and I'm realizing that it is completely going to change. The Internet, born in 1983, is entering its mid-life crisis phase—but rather than dropping its job to pursue self-enlightenment, it's going to spiritually transform in other ways.

We traverse the Internet via the World Wide Web, webpages rendered on our browsers, designed for humans to read. The pages have flashy Hero sections, beautiful animations, and optimized flows that were the result of hours of UX tweaking. I know this well: I spent hours changing the headline of a page at 2am the other day with Rohan—just the headline!—because it results in real user growth. It's insane.

But as AI agents start entering our lives in small ways, from summarizing important information (Google AI Overview) and aiding in financial research (Perplexity Finance announced today) to ordering DoorDash (MultiOn Agent) they will quickly replace some of the most tedious aspects of the web.

If I want to order a chalupa from Taco Bell, why do I need to click 20 things to place an order? Why can't I just text "order a chalupa" to my agent? Even though the future may look like that, the medium of the Internet is far from supporting it.

If you were to place an order on DoorDash today, the flow would look like this:

An AI agent would make things easier:

It should look like this:

At some point, it may even look like this:

If that plays out, I may wake up to 1000 chalupas at 2 am. That may not be a bad thing. My wallet would disagree.

When you go to a website, your browser makes an HTTP GET request and a server returns the HTML contents which are rendered for you to see. Agents can "understand" the returned HTML. But interacting with buttons and complex flows designed for humans is inefficient.

I predict The World Wide Web will disappear. The Internet's archaic human component will be vestigial. Instead, quadrillions of agents will operate as middlemen between human desires and services. I'll call this medium the Agentic Web. (Mostly because it sounds cool)

But how will the thousands of businesses on DoorDash whip up an API and begin taking orders? That doesn't make sense to me. My local taqueria should stick to what it is good at, tacos, rather than well-documented APIs. Since DoorDash acts as aggregate storefront and has the engineering capacity, it is in a great position to connect to the Agentic Web. They already have an API to allow vendors to accept/deny/manage incoming orders. An agent-facing API is inevitable.

Once I have hundreds of agents—managing my to-dos, setting up GCal invites, researching topics, ordering food, taking my Zoom calls, etc., why would I need to search Google? Will UIs become non-existent?

Instead of buying Bored Apes, the Internet's mid-life crisis—the Agentic Web—can call itself the real Web 3.0.