Why Agents Will Unseat More Incumbents Than Social Ever Did

Hey all,

15 years ago I wrote an article about the rise of a more social web for Huff Post.

At the time, Facebook was updating its News Feed and bringing Spotify, Zynga etc. into it. Google was also launching Google+. Obviously, one changed the internet. The other validated it, even if it didn't pay off.

If you think about that shift, we stopped going to the internet to browse our top 10 sites and instead Facebook became the front door to the internet as things collapsed into a feed.

It changed how we consumed news, media and entertainment, which meant it also disrupted to incumbent world order = great swell for startups.

These days I'm obsessed with this same opportunity as we move into a more agentic internet. I wrote a longer form piece on Substack I'll link at the end, but to avoid UI hopping I wanted to provide the basic summary here.

If you've been trying to build something but you're fighting against entrenched user behaviours with a competitor or feel it's just too hard to go up against a giant. Well, maybe you have a secret advantage.

Keep reading...

What's changing?

The internet was built to be:

Human-read, human-clicked, human-navigated.

Everything, like everything, has been built around this.

But now we’re introducing agents that:

• Take our intent

• Hold context

• Execute tasks end-to-end

For a while, humans and agents will share the web.
But eventually, agents will do most of the surfing.

That single change breaks a lot of assumptions.

Like, what's the role of UI?

The opportunity: incumbents are optimized for old behavior

Most successful products today assume:

• Humans initiate

• Humans negotiate

• Humans resolve

But in an agent-first world, the flow becomes:

Intent → agents → outcome

That breaks deeply ingrained UX patterns:

• Links

• Forms

• Inboxes

• Manual configuration

• “Click to convert”

Which means entire categories that feel “done” suddenly aren’t.

That’s how 'immovable' incumbents get unseated - not by better features, but by behavioural mismatch.

A simple example: scheduling

Scheduling tools are incredibly efficient for humans.

But agents don’t need:

• Booking links

• Availability grids

• Email threads

They just need:

Make this meeting happen, given these constraints.

So if you’re building something like @Meet-Ting, you’re no longer fighting the immense efficiency of booking links (which, to be fair, are great and undervalued tech).

You’re operating in a different world, one that’s increasingly agent-first.

This is where context matters: learning about the user, their goals, their relationships, and their ongoing preferences, not just availability slots.

With that context, agents can reason with each other far more intelligently.

What this means for builders

This is one of those shaky snow-globe moments.

Every category now has to answer:

What does this look like when agents are first-class users?

It's not theory, VISA said this is the last year we'll checkout alone, and Google, PayPal etc. all have protocols that allow agents to transact for us.

It really breaks your brain when you go down the rabbit hole.

For advertising, if there's no browsing history or clicks, how does it work? Agents with bounties? Feels like a billion dollar startup line of work alone.

Just imagine

Think about the future.

You wake up. You start your day in a LLM. You say/type what you want. Agents go do the work.

If that's the future of our online experience, so where does your product fit?

Love to hear any thoughts you have or if you're building towards this too?

Substack here: https://chiefting.substack.com/p/the-internet-was-built-for-humans

Thanks,

Dan