The fever around AI agents — advertised as AI tools that perform actions with some degree of autonomy and agency — has taken the tech sector by storm. A few companies see them as potential for expansion — developing agents for their applications or enabling users to create their own agents. But the reality is that agents are a threat to the commercial software industry.
Why? Because agents expose the tech sector’s lies and, most outrageously, the disdain for its customers. And now it is payback time.
Let me show you the tech narratives that got us here.
Narratives About Users
Users do not know what they want
One of the favourite ways of tech to defend their ideas against customers’ interests is the apocryphal quote from Henry Ford, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
This patronising way of developing software is a declaration of intentions — we, those who design software, know better than the people using it. As a result, we decide what to build, which guardrails to apply (if any), and for how long we want to maintain it.
AI Agent Payback (AIAP): Users see agents as a way to finally get software to do what they have asked tech to deliver for decades.
Users are not clever enough
Is your application’s user interface an impenetrable maze, where customers get lost? Or have you advertised your tech product as “democratising” highly complex knowledge when, in reality, it can only be successfully used by people with a PhD and two post-docs?
The answer from tech is to blame it on their users, selling them remediation training and services.
AIAP: Users feel empowered by developing their own agents, which bypass tech companies as painful “intermediaries” between what they want and what they get.
Users are gullible
Tech has embraced the mantra that cybersecurity is a people problem. Has your organisation been hacked, a victim of ransomware, or scammed by a deepfake? Users — aka “human error” — are surely at fault.
As such, users are expected to become cyber risk detectors, while software companies are absolved of ensuring their clients’ safety and security.
AIAP: As users feel they are on their own to fend off cyberattacks, agents do not appear riskier than other software applications.
Users are too complicated
Tech has tried to convince us for years that humans are too complicated and that the only remedy is to create products for a very limited set of idealised standards called “user personas”.
Is the application inaccessible to some users? Biased against them? Or unable to meet their needs? Then those users are deemed to be the problem and left to cope alone. The real issue? The inability of user personas to capture the breadth of the human experience.
AIAP: As users expect to adapt to how applications work, rather than the reverse, clunky agents are not seen as a downgrade but a continuation of subpar tech experiences.
Narratives About Tech
Tech is reliable
Tech companies shower us with their reliability metrics: platform uptime, incident time to resolution, and penetration test results.
The reality is that the commercial tech sector has shown us how they can capitalise on our data (Cambridge Analytica Scandal), massively botch software upgrades (Crowstrike-Microsoft outage), and how their dependence on “free” tools can expose millions of users around the world to cyberattacks (Log4J vulnerability).
AIAP: Users do not feel worse off by the hit-and-miss of agents compared to what they perceived as unreliable service by software providers.
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