- The rise of AI agents could upend how the internet works.
- The technology has the potential to disrupt Big Tech relationships with consumers.
- AI agents could change consuming content, organizing daily tasks, and making decisions.
In the future, you might not read this column on Business Insider's website or app. Instead, your very own AI agent could read it to you as part of a bespoke smorgasbord of daily content, suggestions, decisions, and actions that make your life easier and more organized.
Silicon Valley is all aquiver about this agentic vision as the third year of the generative AI boom gains momentum.
2025 has been hailed as the year of AI agents—personalized digital assistants that can interact with users, do research, gather information, curate content, and ultimately anticipate your needs and get things done before you even ask.
As usual with techno-futurist predictions, this may not come to pass. Generative AI might not progress as quickly as hoped. However, if the technology becomes capable of such feats, it will upend the internet and could disrupt some of the companies that dominate our current digital world.
"There's an idea we can't seem to shake," Bernstein's Mark Shmulik and Nikhil Devnani, two of the top internet analysts, wrote in a recent note to investors. "If AI agents truly become useful, the internet will go dark."
Websites and apps won't go away; it's just that for many of them, consumers won't visit or see these digital locations directly. Instead, they will access information, content, and widgets through an AI assistant that becomes "the aggregator of the aggregators," the analysts said.
"If it scales and plays out like we think it might, this. Changes. Everything. The aggregators get disaggregated, and much of consumer internet may be structural shorts. Welcome to the Agentic AI era," they wrote. "There's nowhere to hide."
Traveling could become easier
The Bernstein analysts cited an example of flying to New York and needing to get from the airport to the office.
Do you really care whether you take an Uber, a Lyft, a Waymo, a cab, or a generic black car service? Probably not. What you really want is the fastest, cheapest, most comfortable ride into Manhattan.
What if your personal AI agent could sort this whole thing out for you? That would radically change the way the internet works. No need to "Google" anything. You might not even need to take out your smartphone (if we even have phones in this agentic future).
"The aggregators have control over the supply, but if demand consolidates and gets fulfilled through an AI agent, you may never need to open your rideshare app again!" the Bernstein analysts wrote.
A new top-of-the-funnel
This could be the ultimate top of the funnel. An AI agent representing each of us would become a powerful new direct connection that tech companies could forge with consumers. All other providers would be funneled through this new digital gate and would likely have to pay some sort of toll—just as Google collects tolls right now on the web through Search ads and Apple collects tolls via App Store fees.
"If you extrapolate these dynamics to their end state, AI Agents could truly disintermediate the aggregators by becoming pseudo marketplaces in their own right," Shmulik wrote.
Big Tech companies and startups are already furiously jostling for control of this future agentic funnel.
In late January, OpenAI unveiled Operator, an AI agent system that uses a web browser to take action on behalf of users, such as booking travel reservations and buying them products.
Users can select a specific website through which they want to process their requests, such as OpenTable, or send the request through a search engine like Google. The key here is that the direct relationship is between the OpenAI agent and the user. Previously, this online journey would probably have started with a Google Search. Now, in the future, Google is just one of many services that OpenAI's Operator might choose.
Google is not waiting around to become just another app on someone else's AI agent platform, though. In December, the company showed off Project Mariner, an AI agent that can browse the web and take actions such as clicking buttons and filling out forms.
Back in October, OpenAI rival Anthropic unveiled a similar tool rolled out as a test feature called "computer use," which enables its AI model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, to use a computer similarly to humans.
Some Anthropic engineers asked to order enough food to feed a group, and this new AI agent tool selected pizza. Alex Albert, Anthropic's head of developer relations, said the tool navigated DoorDash online, and "about a minute later, we saw Claude decided to order us some pizzas." On Monday, Anthropic launched an updated model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, with "extended thinking" capabilities.
Other tech companies, including AI startup Perplexity, have similar offerings.
These AI agents may be delivered via new, voice-based devices. Meta has wearable technology such as its goggles and smart glasses. Apple has put its brand of AI on many of its devices and is working on updates to the Vision Pro goggles. Google is busy baking its Gemini AI models into millions of Android phones and Chromebooks.
An even more unbreakable digital connection?
Is this the ultimate top-of-the-funnel technology? Maybe not.
Elon Musk's Neuralink aims to put chips inside humans' brains. That could create an unbreakable bond with consumers, as the chip would read their thoughts, desires, and needs directly from their heads rather than inferring what people want from Google Searches, Apple app behavior, and social media posts.
This might sound like wild sci-fi dreams, though Google executives have talked about this idea for years.
In 2010, Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, discussed it with The Atlantic, saying a brain implant could be a logical next step for the company's search engine.
"Now you Google things on your computer. And you Google things on your phone. That's the next stage. And I believe — people may laugh — but I think there will be an implant," he said.
