What happens when your customer sends an AI agent?

Websites were built for humans. What happens when your customer stops visiting them?

Yesterday Sierra and Meta announced Personal Agent Protocol, with Instinct, Shopify, Stripe, Walmart and others. The idea is pretty simple: create a standard way for your personal AI agent to identify itself, prove it is acting for you, get permission to do certain things, and interact directly with a business.

Today, when I ask Instinct to change a flight or make a reservation, it often has to use the web the way I would: open pages, click buttons and fill out forms. That feels temporary.

With this kind of protocol, my agent could authenticate with the airline, retailer or bank and deal directly with its API or its own AI agent. I decide what my agent is allowed to do. The company decides what it exposes. OAuth handles the authorization.

If this works, I think the bigger change is that the company may no longer control the primary interface with its customer. My personal agent does.

That has huge implications. What happens to websites and apps? What happens to UX, upselling, loyalty programs, advertising and even brand differentiation if my agent is increasingly making the choices and completing the transactions?

And what does a company need to do to become “agent ready”? Maybe the important digital infrastructure becomes less about building another beautiful front end and more about exposing clean data, APIs, permissions and actions that trusted agents can use.

There are already other pieces emerging around this, including protocols for agent-to-agent communication and agent payments. Google’s AP2, for example, is designed to let agents make authorized transactions, including purchases when the human is not present.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that we may be heading toward a world where every person has an agent. This announcement makes that world feel a little less theoretical.

If your customer starts sending an agent instead of showing up themselves, is your company ready to do business with it?