A few months ago, I needed the cheapest possible flight to Hyderabad with one hard constraint: total journey time—including layovers—could not exceed 25 hours.
Normally this is a 30-minute war: Kayak, Skyscanner, Google Flights, maybe Skiplagged, then the airline sites themselves—cross-checking durations, hidden fees, visa transit rules, the usual dance.
Instead I opened a chat window and wrote one sentence to an LLM.
Thirty seconds later I had four viable options, prices, exact durations, departure times—even which ones had working USB ports in economy (because the agent apparently knows I care). I picked one, paid (still had to jump to the travel-card site—one remaining friction point), calendar event created, boarding pass on the way.
I never visited a single airline website. I never even saw an ad.
That small act felt like crossing an invisible border into the website-less world.
Websites aren’t going away, of course. They’re simply retreating backstage, becoming pure data reservoirs that only machines talk to. The human-facing web of forms, banners, and cookie banners becomes optional, then vestigial, like the command line after the invention of the mouse.
Think about what actually happened behind my casual sentence:
- The agent queried live schedules from dozens of airlines and aggregators
- It calculated door-to-door time, not just air time
- It filtered out routes with tight connections I usually miss
- It could have checked to see that my passport wouldn’t expire mid-trip
- It knew I mildly dislike Turkish Airlines’ food and weighted alternatives
- It could watch for price drops after booking (something I always forget)
That’s twenty former websites collapsed into one calm conversation.
Now multiply that across life.
Your rent goes up? Your agent negotiates with the landlord’s agent or finds you a better place before you even notice.
Spotify gets more expensive? Your agent switches you to the geometrically cheapest lossless tier across platforms, ports your playlists, keeps the price fixed for 24 months.
Doctor’s appointment, tax filing, buying gifts, planning a birthday surprise—everything that once required logins and captchas becomes a single instruction.
But the real question isn’t whether this is possible. You and I are already doing it for flights, research, coding, meal planning. The real question is: when does this stop being an early-adopter trick and become how literally everyone interacts with the world?
Here are the seven dams that need to break, in roughly the order I think they will:
1. Accuracy crossing 99.9 %
Right now LLMs are 95–98 % as good as the best human with twenty tabs. When the gap shrinks to half a percent, the extra effort stops feeling worth it.
2. Lifelong personal memory
The first time your agent remembers your shirt size, dietary restrictions, frequent-flyer numbers, and that you refuse red-eyes without asking, something clicks.
3. Free, local-language, always-on
When a Grok 4–level model runs on a $79 phone in Hindi, Swahili, or Portuguese with no paywall, the global flood starts.
4. Grandma trusts it
My mother still asks me to “book the gas cylinder for her.” The day she dictates the request to her phone in her own words and it just works, that’s the cultural singularity.
5. Institutions accept agent-to-agent settlement
The first major bank or tax authority that says “just talk to your agent, we’ll settle with it directly” triggers everyone else.
Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), released September 16, 2025 with over 60 organizations, is the first big crack in that dam: an open standard for agents to initiate and complete payments using mandates and verifiable credentials - credit cards, bank transfers, stablecoins, crypto, whatever you already trust.
6. Cultural normalization
When TV characters casually say “my agent handled it” the same way they once said “I Googled it,” the vibe shifts overnight.
7. We get comfortable letting agents spend money
The final mental leap: escrow, insurance, one-click rollback, reputation scores—whatever it takes for the average person to say “sure, book it” without reviewing every line.
I used to think the future would arrive with flying cars and robot butlers. (Those are still coming.)
Instead it’s arriving as pure relief: the quiet deletion of forty-seven open browser tabs forever.
So tell me what was the last thing you looked up that required twenty tabs and twenty minutes that an agent could have done in one sentence?
Sooner than we think, that list will be everything.
What do you think?
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Comments
Thank you.
The article, "The Website-Less World Is Already Here (You Just Experienced It)," makes a compelling case for the rise of AI agents that manage complex tasks, effectively collapsing twenty websites into a single conversation.
My opinion is that the implication for business is much deeper than just improved user experience. The true shift is the impending commoditization of the customer journey itself.
Websites are more than interfaces. They are engineered friction points designed to capture data, push advertisements, and control the flow of sales. If a customer's personal agent handles the entire transaction—from search to settlement—companies lose the channel advantage they currently exploit (SEO, display ads, A/B testing, and direct email collection).
Business Value Implication:
The value proposition shifts from optimizing the customer-facing website to optimizing the machine-facing API. Companies must become highly reliable and agent-friendly data reservoirs, as the author suggests. Business success will increasingly rely on verifiable trust and seamless integration into protocols like Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), rather than on front-end design or funnel optimization.
The strategic challenge for every organization is: How do we maintain brand connection and differentiated value when the transaction intermediary is a generalized AI, not our own carefully constructed site? Businesses need an "agent-facing" strategy, not just a customer-facing one.