FT: "The AI agents are coming"

I wanted to highlight this article by Richard Waters in the Financial Times over the weekend. I think it's always useful to track what external 'normal' media is saying about the rise of the agentic interface - or conversational AI.

Publications like the FT, the Economist and Bloomberg can often have a substantial influence on the mindset of many executives.

Last week I was in the Gulf with a leading financial institution there and many of the executives I was speaking with were already generally aware of the 'agent' concept, primarily from these kinds of articles.

Here's a brief quote:

The implications of this seemingly prosaic idea could be far-reaching. If an AI assistant or agent can automatically access whatever data or functionality you need to complete a particular task, you would open fewer apps, visit fewer web sites and tap into fewer digital services. In effect, this would concentrate a person’s digital activity into fewer places.

This is exactly what a lot of players are hoping for! Nice work Richard - I would encourage you to read the full article when time permits.

It did remind me of the new reality that many companies are increasingly going to want to make sure that their systems are as available as possible to agentic systems. Many companies won't want or need to control this emerging interface, they're just going to want to make sure that their services connect easily.

So almost any Conversational AI customer today is ultimately going to be interested in buying your agentic interface, as well as offer their own interactive chatbot. I'll write more on this shortly.