The Rise of Agentic AI Could Be a Return to Form for the Internet

Web designers and marketers have spent the last 25 years thinking about how to drive and keep eyeballs on our websites, with an implicit assumption that those eyes are human. But what happens when web traffic is cluttered with agentic AI bots? Consider a specific example of the technology in action, and how it will likely change the web: Let’s say I’m buying tickets to Paris for my family, but instead of going to a website like Kayak, my personalized AI assistant matches my family’s schedule with available flights, finds the best deals, and presents them to me in minutes. This is already conceivable with reasoning models, the right prompting and data access rights, and should be a consumer-ready offering in the very near future, if it isn’t already. When agentic AI workflows like this begin to gain traction, what happens to websites? Well, Gartner predicts that by 2028: 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI (up from less than 1% in 2024). AI agent machine customers will replace 20% of the interactions at human-readable digital storefronts. To put that another way: 1 in 3 visits to websites will soon be from entities with no eyeballs at all. And 1 out of 5 times, they’ll be shopping for humans, but without any direct human interaction or shroud of human sensory-driven emotion during the sales process. This is why I say it’s time for people in marketing to plan for an imminent future where a website has a mixed audience of humans and AI. So do our colleagues in adtech: Who's selling ads in this future where it’s largely bots skirting past their banners and interstitials? We are fast approaching a humorous but highly plausible scenario where AI agents will begin to advertise their owner’s products and services to other AI agents. In any case, it’s unlikely that ad-supported websites as they currently exist will pencil out well going forward. But that doesn’t necessarily mean a dystopian future where the internet is all AI agents. It may actually be our best opportunity to elevate the human. Focus on the human experience—and be wordy Up to now, retail and consumer sites are all about empowering the customer experience: searching for a specific product to buy based on keywords, buying travel tickets based on selected dates, and so on. But when bots can perform these tasks for us far more quickly (and with much less aggravation for us), website UIs like these will start to go away, or at least be less the emphasis of a commerce website’s homepage. But this doesn’t mean the websites themselves will go away. In fact, one exciting forecast is that consumer sites will become less transactional and much more informational, brand-oriented, and immersive. When the core purpose is no longer being a sales portal, you want a website that powerfully engages the actual humans who are visiting it. As an example of what I mean, consider the New York Times’ website. Even as it’s become an exemplary leader in online news in the age of AI—taking disputes over original content value to courts—we’ve also seen it evolve far beyond headlines into a highly immersive experience, incorporating recipes, community comments, beautiful multimedia articles, and games. These iterations are all about keeping the human on the site long past reading the latest headlines. No one sends their AI agent to win the daily Wordle. The successful websites in the near future will also put more emphasis on words—and word-coded immersive AI experiences—in more detailed product descriptions, blog posts, brand narratives, and beyond. This will be needed partly for the human visitor, but even more so for the AIs scouring the site. Since LLMs depend on words and the vector math precipitating from them (words themselves are their code), text becomes even more important in an agentic internet. We’ve been told that the coming of AI would lead to a frighteningly robotic internet. But in my understanding of future trends, many websites will become both more beautiful and literate. To be clear, this does not mean AI agents will usher in a new online utopia in much the same way as the mobile interface, social media, and even email adoption waves preceding that. We will still need to contend with ongoing challenges around data ownership and usage rights, only made more urgent by the proliferation of AI agents. Within the next five years, the internet giants will surely move to dominate the market for personalized agents, offering us free services in a Faustian exchange for all knowledge of our online lives. But that aside, I see this as a chance to usher in a renaissance of the early web spirit, when sites were highly quirky representations of their human creators and the people who love them. We may soon return to sites like that—if only to escape the infestation of AI bots in social media that once seemed permanently ascendant.

Voice

The Rise of Agentic AI Could Be a Return to Form for the Internet

Anticipating more web traffic from bots is an opportunity to elevate the human experience

Peter Kraus

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications