by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I was listening to Puck’s podcast The Powers That Be today and they were talking about the personnel changes at The Daily Beast. The more I listened to what they were saying about this, the more I was struck by how outdated the very idea of a “website” may be in near future.
Just as Hollywood is about to be severely disrupted by AI software like Sora, so, too, will the media be disrupted by the rise of AI agents. I just don’t see how Websites survive as a viable media outlets when we all have a Her-like personal assistant that roams the Web for us.
What’s more these agents will know us so well that there’s a chance that they will be able to preemptively answer our questions before we ask them. And you’ll interact with these agents with your voice, which changes the whole dynamic of how you will interact with the outside world.
This leads to the question — where does this leave Websites?
I really struggle with this. I think — maybe? — that instead of Websites, we’ll have just a bunch of agents that talk to the individual agents of the million of users around the globe. Or something? Maybe the media will make money off of some sort of subscription regimen so you pay x amount of money so your AI agent can talk to the media website agent?
But the point remains — very soon the entire knowledge economy, media included, will be upended in a pretty dramatic fashion.
