agentic web

What exactly does it mean for the web to be agentic?

AI agents dominated Google I/O and Microsoft Build 2025, heralding what tech companies call the agentic web.

It's not without its problems and I'm not sure AI can save the web. Still, I enjoyed this Decoder podcast episode with The Verge's Nilay Patel and Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott.

Here's a preview.

Patel:

Right now, most of the agentic products will literally open a website and try to scan the website and then click around on the website and then order me a sandwich. And most of those companies are like, “Don’t do that.” Their posture is, “We don’t want you to do that. We’re going to block you and maybe if you’re small enough, we’ll let you do it, but we need to have business terms that make it so that you can just take our capability and put it in your product in this way.”

That problem has to be solved. I’m curious about how you would solve that problem. It sounds like you’re operating at just one step of abstraction beyond that, which is, assuming we solve the business problem, how can we make it so my agent can talk to DoorDash a much easier problem to solve, because clicking around its website has never seemed like a good solution.

Scott:

Yeah, it is brittle and look, I think actually solving the business-model problem goes hand in hand with solving the technology problem. So it’s not just about figuring out a technical way to do something, it’s about getting all of the incentives in the ecosystem aligned the right way where good things are happening for everyone. So if you have a business and you want your business to be able to transact with users via their agent, that has to make good business sense in order for you to be willing for that to happen at all. You can’t just hack your way around that and expect it to be a durable thing. Even if you can temporarily figure out some kind of technical magic to get around the brittleness of the actual technology, you also have to get rid of the brittleness in the business model.