The web isn't a to-do list

Agents will take the errands. They won't take the choosing, and most of the web was never an errand.

Rich people have had agents for a hundred years. They're called assistants.

So we don't have to guess what life with a perfect agent looks like. Look at what the rich do with theirs. The assistant renews the passport, calls the plumber, picks up the dry cleaning. The boss picks the house, the painting, the holiday.

Nobody with an assistant stopped shopping. They stopped doing errands.

That's what agents will do to the web. The pitch for AI browsers is that you'll never visit a website again. That pitch treats the web like a to-do list. Most of it isn't one.

Errands and choices

Some of what you do online is an errand. Reorder the printer ink. Find out when the pharmacy closes. Book the same flight as last time. Cancel a subscription. You already know what you want, and the website is in the way.

Agents should take all of it. Nobody will miss it.

Here's the rule. If you can say what you want in one sentence, an agent can get it. "The same ink as last time" is a sentence. "A sofa that feels right in this room" isn't. Agents win wherever one product is as good as another, and lose wherever it isn't.

Everything else is a choice, and you can't hand off a choice you haven't made yet.

An agent needs to be told what you want. For anything that matters, you don't know until you look. You open twenty flats and find out you care about light more than size. You scroll through beach holidays and realise you want the mountains. The looking is how the wanting gets made. An agent can only answer a question you already have.

That's why the most expensive shops in the world are built for people who could send someone else. They come in person anyway. Choosing is the part they kept.

And most of the time people spend online was never an errand to begin with. About three-quarters of all mobile data is video. Nobody sends an agent to watch something for them.

The obvious objection is that the agent will learn your taste and pick better than you. Maybe it will. A good assistant knows the boss's taste too, sometimes better than the boss does. The boss still picks the house. For the things you care about, choosing isn't a cost to cut. It's the thing you're buying. Nobody wants the optimal holiday. They want to have chosen it.

Silicon Valley's favourite demo

Every assistant launch ends with a booking. In 2018, Google's Duplex phoned a hair salon and booked a haircut. In 2024, Rabbit's R1 planned a holiday on stage, flights and hotel included. In 2025, OpenAI's Operator booked a table for two. It's the demo because it's easy to show, not because anyone wants it.

"The same flight as last time" is an errand. "A flight to Lisbon in May" only looks like one. It's a stack of tradeoffs: price, times, layovers, the airline, the seat, the bags. You find out which ones you care about when you see them. Silicon Valley keeps pitching it. People keep booking their own.

Amazon already tried an agent that shops for you. It sold tens of millions of Alexa speakers partly on the idea that you'd shop by talking to them. In 2018, The Information reported that only about 2% of owners had bought anything by voice that year, and most who tried never did it again. A voice can reorder paper towels. It can't show you a jacket.

Your agent isn't your assistant

There's one more reason to keep choosing yourself. A rich person pays their assistant. Your agent will be free, and free things work for whoever pays for them. ChatGPT already shows ads.

We've seen this before. In 1976, American Airlines started putting its Sabre booking computer into travel agencies. It showed flights from every airline, and American's came first. Agents booked from the first screen, so they booked American. It took until 1984 for regulators to make the systems show an unbiased screen.

For an errand, a biased agent costs you almost nothing. Ink is ink. For a choice, the bias is everything. If the picks might be for sale, you'll want to see the options yourself.

What the web loses

The errand pages die. Recipe sites with a life story above the recipe. "Best laptops of 2026" lists. Pages nobody wanted to visit, built to catch you on the way to one fact and show you an ad. An agent takes the fact and leaves. It's already happening with plain AI search: when Google shows an AI summary, the top result gets 58% fewer clicks.

Good. Those pages were a tax on errands, paid in your time.

What's left is the web people visit on purpose. Fewer people arrive by accident, so every page has to be worth the trip, and design matters more than it used to, not less.

Everyone is about to get an assistant. Rich people already showed us what happens next. The errands disappear. The shopping doesn't.

Sources

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