The internet is changing rapidly, thanks to big shifts in social media and the ongoing wave of AI. Websites have largely remained the same in recent years, staying strong as the home for every business on the internet. I don’t think that will be changing anytime soon, but the nature of the sites themselves may begin to shift.
In a recent blog post, Jeremiah Owyang had some interesting predictions for where AI could be leading, I found two to be quite interesting. The first:
As AI Agents become the dominant entities on the internet, website owners will cater to them by offering Agent APIs that instantly provide information to our AI agents, rather than simulating a human click path as AI agents do today.
In short, if we’re using AI to accomplish tasks (“ChatGPT, how do I solve this problem?”), websites will need to be able provide information to other AI bots and not just humans.
However, I think this will largely be a separate layer. Many websites use APIs today (interfaces to help tools connect together), and those will simply become more robust. The main front-end of a website can remain human-focused, and the APIs can work hard to serve AI bots.
Owyang also said:
Websites won’t go away, but they will need to evolve. When humans visit websites, the content could be AI-generated and personalized to the individual user. The era of thousands of web pages is no longer needed.
This is where the front-end of websites may shift in the coming years. The challenge will be knowing enough about each user to be able to properly customize the page to their needs. This is easy for sites where you log in (the content that you see on Facebook is clearly customized to your needs), but it’s more difficult for open sites.
While it feels like websites have tons of data on us, and some do, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get all of that info summarized. For a website to be able to really customize the content via AI, it’d need to know a lot about you instantly, which is an idea that’s actually fading further away. This is a great thing for privacy, but could lead to some tricky developments in the coming years.
Owyang’s article is quite short, and I encourage you to give it a read. How do you see websites changing in the coming years?
