Agents are a Generalized Technology

I have rather high certainty that the way software is built is about to change dramatically. Most vertical software will shift to general purpose agents. And this is not just history repeating where you move to another layer of abstraction.

Agents are a more generalized technology which means, aside from some specialized tools and use cases, the actual business workflows you see at a lot of back-offices will be done by agents that have the same underlying code. Sure, there might be consulting work to customize these agents, but as far as businesses that scale like startups, these are going to be structured to serve the agent’s needs, rather than whatever analyst X at industry Z thinks they need.

This is a fundamental shift. You don’t need to believe me, and I don’t need to convince you. But I believe in this very strongly.

Vertical software has been a way to roughly encode processes into digital machines, so that humans can introduce intelligence into those processes. Most of the vertical AI you see out there is the same exact paradigm, with some of those human-in-the-loop tasks being replaced with a small LLM step (“is this document an NDA or a SAFE”).

There’s an inverted way to do this. You tell the agent what you want. The agent does it until it gets stuck. You don’t know or care how it’s doing it, so long as you can trust the results. The agent keeps getting better every 6 months, for free. You don’t need to write more software or better prompts. Just keep doing your job and the thing will improve.

The moat is whatever the agent needs to do its job. If the agent uses Plaid, then Plaid is good. If the agent uses LLMs, then LLMs are good. If the agent uses GPUs, then GPUs are good. Value will be accrued to those companies that are serving the agent.

Yes, you still need to sell products to companies and someone at a company has to decide to pay. But I challenge you to digest the fact that building for agents is not the same as building for the humans that use vertical SaaS products. It’s very different from digitizing project management and processes inside companies.