Remember when having a website was optional? Plenty of business owners I talked to in the early days thought the web was a fad. Then their customers started searching online, and the businesses without a site got left behind.
I think we are at a similar point again. This time it’s called the agentic web.
So what is it? Today the web is built for people. You open a browser, click around, fill in forms and hit submit. On the agentic web, a lot of that clicking is done by software agents working on your behalf. You tell an agent what you want, like “book me a flight to Toronto on Thursday for under $400,” and it visits the sites, compares the options and completes the booking.
Think of it as hiring an assistant who never sleeps and has a login to every site you use. That is the big upside. As you’ll see below, it’s also the big risk.
A new way of doing business
For twenty-five years we have competed for human attention. We built sites to rank in Google, tuned landing pages to convert visitors and bought ads to get clicks. All of that assumes a person is on the other end.
On the agentic web, your next customer might be a piece of software. The agent doesn’t care about your banner ad. It cares whether it can find your prices, check your stock and place an order without getting stuck on a confusing checkout.
That changes a few things:
- Your website needs a front door for machines as well as people. Open APIs and newer standards like the Model Context Protocol (MCP) let agents talk to your systems directly.
- Clean, structured data matters more than slick design. If an agent can’t read your product details, you won’t make its shortlist.
- Business deals can happen agent to agent. A buyer’s agent can ask five suppliers for quotes and have answers back in minutes, not days.
The analysts expect this to move fast. Gartner predicts that by 2028, a third of enterprise software will include agentic AI, up from less than 1% in 2024. It also expects at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions to be made by agents by then.
Most organisations are still feeling their way in. When Gartner polled 3,412 people in January 2025, only about one in five said their organisation had made a significant investment.
In other words, it’s still early. If you start planning now, you won’t be behind.
The problems it can solve
Every business I know has the same headaches. Here are the ones agents are good at.
Copy and paste work. Staff spend hours moving information from an email into the accounting system, then into a spreadsheet, then into the CRM. An agent can read the email, update each system and flag anything that doesn’t match.
Waiting. Customers don’t want to wait until Monday morning to reschedule a delivery or check an order. An agent can handle that at 2 a.m. on a Sunday.
Shopping around. Comparing suppliers, insurance quotes or shipping rates takes time, so most of us just go with who we used last time. An agent will check them all, every time.
Forms nobody understands. Government and insurance forms can be hard work, especially for people who are older or don’t speak the language well. An agent can walk someone through it or fill in the parts it already knows.
Small teams doing big jobs. A five person company can’t afford a procurement department. With a few well set up agents, it can get some of the same benefits.
How companies and institutions can use it
You don’t need to hand the whole business over to agents. The smart move is to start with the jobs that happen often and don’t cost much if something goes wrong. Here are a few examples I’ve seen work:
- Accounts payable. An agent matches incoming invoices to purchase orders and delivery slips, then queues them for payment. A person only looks at the ones that don’t line up.
- Customer service. Agents answer order status questions, process simple returns and book appointments. The tricky calls still go to your team.
- Procurement. An agent requests quotes, compares them against your rules and puts a short list in front of a buyer.
- Staff onboarding. New hires get accounts, equipment orders and training booked without HR chasing five departments.
Institutions can use the same approach. A city could let residents check a permit application or book an inspection through an agent. A hospital could handle appointment reminders and insurance paperwork. A university could answer enrolment questions and send transcripts on request.
The chart below is how I’d sort the options. Anything in the top left is a good place to start. Anything in the bottom right needs a person making the final call.
The risks
Now for the part the sales people skip. An agent that can act for you can also make mistakes for you, and it can make them quickly.
Security. Agents read web pages, emails and documents, and some of those are written by people who want to trick them. A hidden line of text on a web page can tell an agent to send data somewhere it shouldn’t. This is called prompt injection, and it’s the new phishing.
Mistakes at scale. A person who misreads an invoice gets one wrong. An agent with a bad rule can get a thousand wrong before lunch.
Who is responsible? If an agent books the wrong shipment or agrees to the wrong price, is that on you, the software vendor or the supplier’s agent? The law hasn’t caught up yet.
Privacy. To be useful, agents need access to your email, calendar, files and payment details. That is a lot of keys to hand over. Ask where the data is stored and who can see it.
Cost and hype. Gartner expects more than 40% of agentic AI projects to be cancelled by the end of 2027 because of rising costs, unclear value or weak risk controls. It also estimates only about 130 of the thousands of vendors selling “agents” are the real thing.
How to get started
Here’s my checklist for getting your business ready without getting burned:
- List the tasks your team repeats every day and note how often they happen and what a mistake would cost.
- Pick one high volume, low risk task and run a small pilot for a month.
- Keep a person in the loop for anything involving money, contracts or personal data.
- Set hard limits. Give agents spending caps and only the system access they need.
- Log everything the agent does so you can check its work and undo mistakes.
- Make your own website agent friendly with clear product data, published prices and an API if you can.
- Review the results before you expand to the next task.
The businesses that got online early had a head start for a decade. I think the same will be true here, as long as you go in with your eyes open.
Are you getting your business ready for the agentic web? Let me know in the comments.
Sources
- Gartner Predicts Over 40% of Agentic AI Projects Will Be Canceled by End of 2027, BigDATAwire, June 25, 2025