This moment reminds me of mid-2007 when, after standing in line on the first day, I started playing with my new iPhone 1. At that time, and right now, I was seeing the future but couldn’t yet grasp all the manifestations.
The initial change we’ve all experienced over the past few years is going to an AI chat interface like ChatGPT and asking a question. Presto, there is your answer. No clicking on a blue link to visit to a website required.
For example, I searched on “The best Father’s Day gift ideas” on Google, saw a blue link to an article in the New York Times, and used Firefox's AI previews to get a sense of what the article is about. Oh, cool, I said to myself as I read the preview, that wine opener sounds perfect. I didn’t click on the article.
An even more significant change is coming with the rapid increase of the Agentic Web, an emerging vision of the internet where autonomous AI agents perform tasks on behalf of users, proactively and intelligently.
For example, I use an agent to watch for changes in a website that offers signups for experiences I enjoy but that have limited availability and sell out quickly. I’m alerted to the change so I can sign up before the offering is sold out.
Imagine your favorite, very popular restaurant putting tables available for reservations about a month ahead, but they do it randomly and you don’t know exactly when. In the past, you might go to the restaurant website a bunch of times per day and hope to get lucky. Now, your agent can monitor the restaurant’s reservation page and alert you when new tables are made available. Or it could book a table for you if you give it parameters like “book a table for two people on a Saturday night in July between 6:00pm and 7:00pm”.
As marketers, these are significant disruptions to how our websites are used. If you haven’t done so already, you should begin learning about what to do to stay ahead of these changes.
The basic idea is that you will need to structure your website to make the content easily found by agents, not just by people. Elements like product descriptions, pricing, and other details need to be properly structured and presented so AI agents can find them. If people can sign up for something (like a restaurant reservation), make the structure for doing so easy for an agent to complete the task too.
My friend Shelly Palmer has some specific ideas in his excellent post The Agentic Web: Your Website Is About to Become a Workflow.
It can be tough to wrap our minds around new technology. Back in 2007, I wondered how my brand-new iPhone would change my life, and I experimented with the various apps to find out.
Now I’m doing the same with AI agents. You should too.
Several days ago, Opera, the Norwegian web browser used by the cool kids announced Opera Neon, the first AI agentic browser.
Opera Neon comes with an AI agent that gives users the opportunity to automate routine web tasks (like filling forms, making hotel bookings, and shopping), and have the browser do them by understanding and interacting with the content of web pages. Neon performs these tasks locally in the browser, preserving users’ privacy and security.
I haven’t tried Opera Neon yet, but it seems like a good place to start experimenting with AI agents.
Image via ChatGPT with the prompt “Please create an image to illustrate a blog post about the agentic ai web. The image should be landscape orientation and about 2:1. Let's try an image with a notebook computer on a desk with agents, depicted as small robots, visiting several different web pages.”