The Age of Agents – Product Dev for AI
In a world before software started eating the world Product Development was more simple: Focus on the Customer Experience (CX) and success would eventually follow.
Then, along with the rise of the Internet, the modern web and a smartphone in every pocket, new possibilities arose. What was considered good CX increased, combined with what was possible in terms of speed and reliability. The game of Product Development sped up and got a lot more complex. To win, you needed to be delivering faster, real-time and frictionless experiences, with easy to navigate User Interfaces and delightful design.
No longer was a home-grown spreadsheet good enough, you needed a Database, which could talk to a front-end (via APIs), and that front-end needed to be responsive and mobile-friendly (Apps). And all of this needed to be scalable and reliable (Cloud Infra).
For a lot of organisations, what held them back was often the capabilities of their back-end systems and processes, many of which were still fairly manual. The mission was to digitise everything, to the point where you could abstract away all the messy things that needed to happen. And then to keep that all running without burning loads of cash.
EX (and DX) leads to CX
Loads of orgs are still in that space, and they’ve got years of work ahead to play this game better. But this race has largely consumed the last decade or so, with plenty of players still playing catch up. This was where Software as a Service chewed away at a whole raft of verticals, sweeping away old manual systems and fusty old organisations who couldn’t keep up with the pace of change.
Keeping up was often a function of both Employee Experience (EX) but the main constraint in a lot of orgs was a subset of that: the Developer Experience (DX). If you could both attract and retain and make it much easier and safer for developers to expose various datapoints in your backend (yes, via APIs) and get that data in real-time into the hands of users via various front-ends (Web Apps and Mobile Apps), then you had a real shot at winning. For the last decade or so, DX and EX leads to better CX. Loads of organisations struggled with this, and still do, even when it’s super obvious that their business is almost entirely digital (e.g. Financial Services).
Now though, there’s another wave coming, which will leave a lot of players gasping for air again, as the pace and complexity is even higher. We’re entering into the early days where Agent Experience (AX) is likely to be the new constraint.
Enter Generative AI
What we’re starting to see (it’s still very early days) is a new frontier that we need to optimise our systems and processes for. Employee Experience (EX) and Developer Experience (DX) will still be important, but on its own may no longer be enough. We now need to consider whether our product offering needs to be accessible and usable by Generative AI agents. Organisations that have good Agent Experience (AX) are more likely to be picked up and used by this wave of Gen AI that we are seeing.
A couple of early examples that demonstrate what I mean:
- Supabase provides backend “Database as a Service”, with related Auth and other related offerings that developers and organisations need. Their DX is fabulous, so their adoption rate is like a hockey stick. But even more interesting is how Supabase is emerging as the preferred backend storage system for a whole raft of Agent-driven adoption. Supabase is the default option built in to both Lovable.dev and Bolt.new, two fairly new Gen AI Prototyping tools.
- Netlify and Vercel provide hosting for web apps, which again started with super nice DX. But now they’re both emerging as dominant in the Agent-driven adoption, mostly because both are easy for Gen-AI tooling to interact with. Vercel has it’s own GenAI tooling, v0.dev which of course uses Vercel.
The lesson here is that EX and DX are a good start, but the new battleground goes even further, into making your product easy to use for Agents. AX could start to push the EX-dominant players out of the way.
Where this goes, who knows. But as an example, I’m willing to bet that the first bank to provide not just great EX and DX, but also great AX will likely see it leap ahead of the competition. Same with HR systems, Legal systems, and all of the other things that are considered the basic building blocks of starting a company. I should be able to not just have the AI generate the website or tech that delivers my product to customers, I should be able to spin up the whole company with a few prompts. Company formation, bank accounts, contracts, employee onboarding, all of it.
And that’s just the B2B space. I can only imagine what the B2C space might look like. It’s worth pondering though. It’s coming, whether we like it or not.
AX is the new DX and EX boosting CX.