From human clicks to machine intent: Preparing the web for agentic AI

The article highlights the incompatibility of the current web with AI-driven agentic browsing, designed primarily for human users. Hidden instructions and lack of context awareness allow agents to execute unintended actions, posing security risks. Enterprise applications demonstrate machines' difficulty navigating complex, customized workflows, unlike human users. The web's reliance on visual design and inconsistent patterns hinders machine understanding, leading to failures in tasks. The author advocates for a redesigned web that incorporates semantic structure, agent guides, action endpoints, and standardized interfaces. Security and trust are critical, necessitating guardrails like least privilege, intent separation, sandboxed modes, and audit logs. Businesses must adapt by making their services agent-friendly to remain visible and usable in an AI-mediated web. Metrics will shift from page views to task completion in this evolving landscape. The transition involves an AI-native web, both human-friendly and machine-readable, is inevitable. Agentic browsing forces us towards a web structured, secure and machine-readable.