Vendors: Are you working on your Agentic Interface Platform?

How will Apple's Siri connect to your customer's systems to manage their requirements?

If you're in the business of offering Conversational AI interfaces to all and sundry (and I know many readers are), how are you thinking about the near future?

Whilst many of your customers are likely going to need some kind of compelling Conversational AI interface for the foreseeable future, there are quite a few, I'd suggest, who are going to want to make sure that their systems are consumable by other AI agents.

How are you helping with this? Are you planning to support this? Could this be an extension to your existing service offering? Should you be making sure your customers are aware of your (potential) new offering in this regard?

Let me take a step back a moment...

Let's say you're customer is a Water Utility company, BigWater Inc.

They're absolutely delighted with the new whizzy Conversational AI system you've given them. You're pulling in a million dollars a year from them and you've signed a 3-year contract, that, if you play your cards right, is more likely 10+ years. And there's scope for some modest (highly profitable) RPI "inflation" adjustment price increases too.

All is good.

BigWater Inc. customers are flocking to the Conversational AI tool you've provided. They're using it to manage their bills, change payment details and so on. Your tool has resulted in a meaningful (30%?) reduction in phone calls to the BigWater call centre already. BigWater customers are reporting increased net promoter scores. BigWater is happy. You are happy too.

The base level use case for all of this is the understanding that customers of BigWater will always want to speak to BigWater in the future.

Now then.

Let's speculate about the Rise of the Agentic Interface.

For simplicity, let us pretend that it's Apple's Siri that suddenly begins to dominate the Agentic interface. Play the game with me. I know that there are a lot of reasons why this wouldn't happen – and there are a lot of players out there vying to ensure it's their service that customers will be choosing.

So we'll assume that Siri begins to dominate.

We'll assume that at the upcoming 2025 Apple Developer Conferences, Apple announces the release of "SiriKit", their interface to help developers directly integrate their services with Siri.

(Did you read that sentence nodding away? Apple actually released SiriKit almost a decade ago - it's just not been that relevant for many until now.)

Let's rephrase.

Let's assume Apple starts to really push the use of Apple Intelligence (and Siri as the interface for this) to developers and customers. After all, they have an iPhone 17 to sell and one of the major 'features' could be this ability to connect into, for example, Bank of America, or Verizon, via Siri. Speculation yes, but play along with me.

So BigWater is really pleased with the $1M Conversational AI tool you've given them.

But next year, their executives are all watching the Apple Keynote and noting that Tim Cook (et al.) are showing how you can use Siri to manage all sorts of aspects of your life.

They're showing that you can use Siri (and Apple Intelligence) to manage your utilities, your shopping, your bank balance and so on.

Suddenly the Innovation Team at BigWater are on fire, electrified by some WhatsApp enquiries from the senior executives.

How will they make sure that customers can also use Siri to connect to and query their water utility bills?

One option is that the Innovation Team simply get the technology team to go straight to the Apple Developer SiriKit website and use the API details there to knock out a demo interface within a few days.

The BigWater executives love it.

After all, Apple enjoys a unique position in Corporate America (and Corporate Earth). When Apple does something, executives usually like to support it. (When Google or Android launch something, there is far less support, right?)

The strong risk is that your Conversational AI tool now becomes second tier priority.

But what if you were standing in the wings with your Agentic Interface Tool? Your tool builds on the knowledge, APIs and capabilities already established for the front-end (or internal) Conversational AI systems in place. It just makes the capabilities available to any AI Agent that your client chooses. It's already got support for Siri, Bixby (or whatever Samsung is calling it this week), Google Assistant and more... right?

I'm reaching here, I know. I am massively speculating. But I would hope you're not entirely disagreeing with me on the basic premise.

There is a school of thought that says we'll rapidly see the rise of Agentic Interfaces to help customers manage all aspects of their lives.

It might be that AI Home Management agents become very popular – and these are distinct from an AI Financial Controller that you use to manage your banking, investments and insurance. Or it might be that customers absolutely love the convenience of a specific platform interface like Apple's Siri, or Meta's WhatsApp.

I wrote the other week about the bank executive I met who's already making sure their teams are working heavily on preparing for an Agentic interface future, by organising their APIs, data and product sets accordingly, now.

"Agentic" is definitely a focus that we're seeing a lot more company founders and chief product offers looking at today.

So, dear vendor, what are you doing to prepare?