How AI Agents Will Change the Web for Users and Developers
Photo by paolo tognoni on Unsplash.
AI agents will alter the web, leading to a new dynamic where agents talk to other agents over the internet and content is decoupled irreparably from the presentation layer.
That’s the future industry observer Jeremiah Owyang predicted at the WP Engine DE{CODE} conference, held April 15 and shared on YouTube. Owyang is an AI investor, industry observer and blogger who founded Llama Lounge, a series of events focused on AI startups.
It’s worth noting that Owyang is also an investor in CrewAI, a multiagent platform. That said, Owyang told audiences his predictions are based on interviews with AI startup founders, corporate leaders and other investors.
His talk was titled, “What is my content strategy in a world of AI agents?” but his forecast has implications beyond content creators, extending to everyone who creates the web, including web and frontend programmers.
“I’ve been in Silicon Valley for 27 years, and I’ve witnessed all these tech waves,” Owyang said. “I’ve got to tell you, the AI wave is the biggest one I’ve ever seen in my entire career.”
He foresees swarms of AI agents crawling the web.
“Think of it as a living creature,” he said. “It’s autonomous, and it could sense the world around it. It can determine the actions it needs to take. It can actually execute those actions, achieve those goals and then, over time, it learns.
“Now, if you work in the web publishing space or content space, this means that the most common visitor to your website in the future will not be human. It will be an AI agent.”
As AI agents gain traction, it will lead to a web where agents interact with other agents.
“The internet is going to be shifting to an autonomous internet, where AI agents are ruling the web,” he said. “That spells a lot of changes for anybody who is involved in creating the internet.”
Software engineers will help these AI bots by serving up APIs to feed these agents content, he added.
Agents Everywhere, for Everything
AI agents might access a user’s credit card transactions, shopping history, emails and even text messages to automatically determine what to do.
“It will have verifications and permissions to log into systems,” he said. “It can complete those actions and then it will actually learn over time.”
For our personal lives, we might have one AI agent that plans and handles the shopping and another that filters, prioritizes and responds to our email, he said.
“Think of it as a living creature. It’s autonomous, and it could sense the world around it.”
— Jeremiah Owyang, AI investor and industry observer, on AI agents
At work, AI agents might assemble our tasks, create content or even a content series, such as a marketing campaign. Self-driving cars in your city? That’s the physical manifestation of an AI agent, he said.
“The advanced use case for an AI agent is that it can hire, summon or create other AI agents, like a manager, so they have a fleet or a swarm of AI agents, and that is the advanced form of this,” he said. “Many of us will have AI agents reporting to us at work, at home or somewhere in between, and this is the reality that we need to prepare for now.”
The shift already is happening, he contended, pointing to Salesforce as one example.
The customer relationship management (CRM) platform has retooled and rebranded its whole conference and product suite to be called AgentForce. It introduced customer care agents, which makes sense given AI’s early chatbot days. But it’s also offering sales and marketing agents to help marketers at enterprise-class companies serve their customers, he said.
Even smaller businesses are leveraging AI agents. He pointed to HubSpot’s AI agent marketplace, where customers can find agents to perform research about competitors, create blog posts, perform keyword searches and even automate marketing campaigns.
The AI-Driven Web
His vision is a short hop to either paradise or dystopia, depending on your tolerance for change and perhaps how many times you’ve seen “The Matrix.” Still, if he’s right, it will change the web in a dramatic way.
“Hold on to your hats: In the future, the AI agents will go and visit the websites on behalf of their masters, and they will bring that information back to their masters, the humans, and reassemble it into one location,” Owyang said. “That means that the most common visitor to a website in the future is probably not going to be humans, but AI agents that are surrogates reporting to humans.”
Industry observer Jeremiah Owyang’s vision of the coming AI agent ecosystem.
AI agents will deliver content and data in whatever mode the user prefers. It might be text, but it also could be audio or video generated by the AI and delivered whenever and in whatever interface the user wants.
“This is a big change for the internet,” he said. “It means that the data layer and the content layer is about to separate and decouple from the presentation layer.”
While he acknowledged that content can be decoupled from the interface with an RSS file now, he cautioned that the impact of AI agents will be greater, even changing business models. In fact, Gartner forecasts that search engine traffic will plummet by 25% by the end of the year because of AI.
He warned: “If you are used to getting search engine traffic as a content creator or producer or developer, that means that the ways and the routes that you’re going to get new visitors — human or agentic — is going to change as well.”
Profit Models Change
Agents representing us with different levels of permissions and identity will be a big shift, but not the only one. It will also change payments, he predicted, which means developers will have to revamp to support new payment structures.
“In the case of agents, they’re often going to be doing microtransactions that could just be a few cents, and … it’s not logical for an AI agent to use a credit card,” he said. “The fees are too high, so they will use stable coins or some other form of payment.”
Developers and content producers in Silicon Valley are already interested in offering content at the micro level, he added.
“It’s possible that you might have visitors to your website in the future that want to purchase a premium content for just a few cents,” he said. “There’ll be thousands, millions of those transactions happening per week, per month, and that will be a new revenue source.”
Google ads also may become less relevant, he said, but ads will evolve, not disappear. He pointed to the AI search engine Perplexity, which has said it may have ads in the form of sponsored answers to users’ queries.
Websites on the AI-Driven Web
Humans will still visit sites that entertain and provide news, gaming experiences or social collaboration — but they’ll send AI agents to productivity-based sites such as Amazon, Owyang predicted.
“The websites that are attractive, that you want to go to, those will be the ones that you as a human will go to, but any other type of content that is just informational or laborious or filled with ads? No, you can have your AI agent go and do that,” he said.
While AI will centralize information for us and deliver in a multimodal format of the user’s choosing, he clarified, that doesn’t mean websites are pointless.
“Hear me very carefully,” he said. “Websites actually become more important, way more important, because where do you think those agents are getting that information?”
What This Means for Developers
Content will train the AI agents, Owyang said, so websites need to ensure content is updated, cleaned and a single source of information.
He also predicted that a new type of AI agent API will emerge, designed to help AI agents.
“It also means that every company is going to be launching an AI agent on their website that will interact with humans, and then also the agent will interact with the buyer-side agent, and they’ll have a dialog,” he said. “That’s an opportunity for you to build those two things.”
Another opportunity for frontend developers, he said, will be in building personalized experiences — such as presenting the content in a user’s preferred languages — and doing so at scale, across every single touch point.
Big Tech’s Reaction
Big Tech can already see the AI agent revolution coming, he said.
“Google knows this, and they have to figure this out. It’s an existential threat to them,” he said.
Google’s Project Mariner is one way Google is trying to get in front of this shift, he added. Built on Gemini 2.0, Mariner embeds an agent as an extension of Chrome. It can interpret a user’s instructions to navigate websites, input information and perform actions such as finding contact details or adding items to a shopping cart.
He also pointed to OpenAI’s Operator, which is in research preview and available to Pro users in the U.S. Operator is an AI agent that can use its own browser to perform tasks for users.
“This is an agent that is also connected to its own browser that can perform tasks for you, whether it’s collecting information or completing transactions,” he said. ”If they have the right distribution, then everybody’s going to need a new browser. We’ve already gone through the browser wars, so I’m a little skeptical that they’ll get that distribution, but we’ll see what happens.”
