For the whole history of the web, the user was a person. That just ended. The AI agent is becoming the customer, and almost nobody is building for it yet.
One wants to be persuaded. The other wants to be able to act. Same business, two design jobs.
The user was a person. Your beautiful website existed to win their attention.
The user is an AI agent acting for someone. Your company has to be machine-usable.
Every step has missing infrastructure. The old web assumed a person was doing the work.
The agent goes looking, not the human.
Docs, pricing, APIs, reviews. Not your hero video.
Policy, limits, identity. Who is this acting for?
Paying, booking, signing, subscribing.
Filing tickets, changing settings, pulling reports.
"This one worked." Agents referring agents. The weirdest part.
What does an agent need that a person already had? Each answer is a company waiting to be built.
Who is this agent acting for, and on whose authority?
What actions can it safely invoke without breaking things?
Where do OTPs, docs, and threads land for the agent to read?
What does it know about my preferences and my rules?
What can it spend, and who approves the spend?
What did it see, decide, change, and buy? The audit trail.
Not a forecast. This is shipping right now.
Email inboxes for AI agents. Like Gmail, but the account holder is a bot. YC-backed.
A wallet for your agent. Spend caps, approval rules, and an audit trail.
Files the ticket, attaches the logs, asks for the refund, escalates when ignored.
A CFO agent reads 12 vendors' SOC 2 docs and recommends the one that fits policy.
Real tools for agents. Search customers, create invoices, pull reports. No UI scraping.
Books the dinner, moves the reservation, pays the deposit, updates the calendar.
One persuades a human. The other lets a machine understand you and act. Miss the second, go invisible.
"If an agent can't understand what you do and safely do something with you, you're basically invisible to them."
Same pages. Each one flips from "convince a person" to "let a machine act."
Take any tool you love, ask "what's the agent version," and you've got a company.
His transcript ends here. What follows is Olga and Athena brainstorming against it: the deal-size question, the play Olga already ran, and the questions worth chewing on next.
↓For thirty years, every website was built to win one thing: a human's attention. Persuade the person and you win. That assumption is breaking. A second customer is showing up, and it doesn't read the web the way we do. It evaluates, transacts, renews, and recommends through structure and permission instead of brand and copy.
Greg, 645,000 subscribers, spent a whole episode landing on it and called it the next $100 billion market. The striking part isn't that it's coming. It's that almost nobody is building for it yet.
This is bigger than any one product or company. Before jumping to "here's the answer," it's worth sitting in the open questions. The deal-size one started it. The rest are below.
The gut call: a $100K deal won't get closed by an agent. The research backs that, and it reframes the question. There is no fixed dollar line. The cap is set per user, and the real variable is how bad a mistake would be.
Where every real deployment starts. A wrong call is a shrug, not a lawsuit. The user sets a spend cap, the agent works under it.
The agent does the work and stages the decision. A human taps yes. Same trust ladder you give a new employee with a credit card.
The $20K and $100K deals. The agent reads the docs, screens vendors, and hands a human a short list. The signature stays human, maybe forever.
You did the heavy work with your agent first. Docs, comparisons, pressure-testing, checking it was real. By the time you booked the Loxo demo, the evaluation was done. The human call was the signature, not the search.
That's the near-term version Greg skips. The agent-assisted buyer isn't 10 years out. It's you, this year. The agent didn't pay. It decided who got the meeting. That alone changes how every site has to be built.
Deal size was the first one. Here are the next six, the ones that decide where the real opportunity sits and who gets to own it.
Today a normal business literally cannot make a /agents surface with schemas, tools, OAuth, and checkout. So either every business hires engineers, or something generates it for them. Whoever makes any business legible to agents without a developer unlocks the whole shift.
The Loxo story says the assisted buyer, a human steering an agent to research and shortlist, is here today. Autonomous agents spending money is later. So the first dollar is probably "be discoverable and trusted when someone's agent does the research," not "let agents check out."
Agent-invisibility is silent. You never see the deals where an agent screened you out and moved on. Whoever makes that loss visible, which agents came, what they asked, where they bounced, gives the market its reason to act.
Counterintuitive answer: the small, local, transactional ones. Bookings, deposits, reschedules, restocks are exactly the low-regret transactions agents will run end to end. Main Street may get reshaped by agents before the enterprise does.
When a buyer's agent shows up, most businesses have nothing on the other side to answer it. A growing asymmetry: armed buyers, unarmed businesses. Who arms the seller side, and does a business get its own agent that quotes, answers, and books?
Brand, reviews, social proof. An agent ignores all of it. It checks identity, policy, limits, receipts. So what becomes the new trust layer for machines, and who gets to set the standard everyone has to meet?