Me, Myself, and My Agents

By Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist, Zoho

Last week my travel agent, Atlas, reminded me that I'll need a visa to travel to Ecuador for Zoholics, our annual user conference. Atlas was right. I didn't realize Ecuador had changed its visa policies. Yesterday, Atlas proactively reminded me about my travel to Zoholics in Houston and suggested a few restaurants near where we are staying.

Atlas is one of a dozen agents I've built to help me with my productivity. This morning my tech specialist, Manu, told me to look at SubQ LLM, which claims 12M token context windows, 52x faster inference, at 5% of Opus costs. I passed this to Veda, my research assistant, to dig in and share more based on my interests.

My interest in architecture was passed to Nova (my reading assistant on architecture), who now reads books on my behalf and shares what he learns on a blog and an X account I gave him to post on. Among other agents are Jasmine, who files my expenses in Zoho Expense, and Jarvis, the orchestrator. I recently gave Jarvis my electricity bill to find me alternatives. He did, told me I could save $50/month if I switched providers, and set himself a reminder for when my contract is about to expire.

After living with these agents for a few weeks, I can see where we are headed.

Agents are the new office suite.

Office suites, like any software, are tools to get things done. They are better productivity tools than the ones we previously had. We use them to execute our tasks because we can reason. AI now gives agents the ability to reason and execute on our behalf. We are moving from the age of productivity to the age of execution.

Software has been the tool layer for us. Now it is becoming the tool layer for agents. Soon, I suspect agents will quickly create the tools (software) they need to serve us. They will create these tools from scratch (like Claude is doing now), or extend the tools they already have access to on the fly. That re-orders the stack. Software drops one layer down. Instead of us interfacing with software, we will interface with agents.

Agents are the interface between humans and software.

As humans, we are all unique. So will the agents we build. None of the agents I built for myself would be useful to you as they are. Not because the capability is unique, but because I gave each one its DNA based on my preferences. I defined how they think, what they know about me, and their personality. You can say, I defined their 'brain'. You will define yours differently. So, Agents are going to be bespoke.

If agents are going bespoke, so will software. When each of us have bespoke agents, this also means, we will have bespoke software at the individual level. In a business context, I expect each company to run on its own agents calling on its own software, both shaped around the way that business works. Bespoke business software is coming and I suspect the one-size-fits-all application could start to look like an artifact from the past.

If this is how things play out, what does this mean for our industry and us? This means agents are the executors. Software is the enabler for agents, and the focus should be on agents that get things done. Creating agents and giving them the necessary tools (software) becomes the name of the game, and companies that realize and navigate this well will thrive, like we have seen from past waves. For us, this is the question worth asking: are we building software for users, or are we building software for the agents that will serve them? I am leaning towards the latter - the software I am creating is not for me to use. It is for the agents to use to serve me. This is an important shift in thinking.

How we navigate this will decide the role we play in the future ahead.