The agentic web is here

In 2001, a decade after he invented the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee articulated a new vision.

Together with two colleagues, he published an article in the magazine Scientific American in which he outlined what he called the “Semantic Web”: an internet designed to be navigated by autonomous software agents that could address our every need, without requiring us to muck about with browsers and search engines ourselves.

To illustrate what this might look like, Berners-Lee and his colleagues told a story about a pair of siblings who use their agents to automatically research and book a physical therapy appointment for their mother, making sure it would be covered by insurance and fit their busy calendars.  At the turn of the millennium, this vision seemed far-fetched: Google had only been online for a couple of years, and most people were still on dial-up connections.

But a quarter-century on, the dream of autonomous software agents that use the internet and carry out tasks for us has finally been realized.

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