The Future of AI on the Web: Why We Need a New Agentic Stack
Artificial intelligence is rapidly evolving. AI agents are now poised to become our primary partners in navigating the digital world, capable of booking flights, conducting research, and managing complex tasks on our behalf. However, there’s a fundamental and growing problem: the internet was built for human eyes and hands, not for autonomous AI agents.
Today, we force these advanced agents to interact with the web through a clunky and inefficient method: controlling a web browser. They “look” at pixels, try to understand visual layouts, and simulate mouse clicks. This approach is not just slow and unreliable; it’s a security nightmare waiting to happen.
To unlock the true potential of AI online, we don’t need better browser automation. We need a completely new foundation—an Open Agentic Web Stack designed specifically for secure and efficient machine-to-machine interaction.
The Critical Flaws of Using Browsers for AI Agents
Forcing an AI to use a website designed for humans is like asking a supercomputer to communicate by carving messages in stone. It works, but it’s incredibly inefficient and prone to breaking. The core issues fall into three main categories:
Fragile and Unreliable: Websites constantly change their visual design. When a button is moved, a color is changed, or a layout is updated, an AI agent that relies on visual cues can instantly break. This makes agent-based automation brittle and untrustworthy for critical tasks. An agent that worked perfectly yesterday could fail today for a reason as simple as a marketing banner being added to a page.
Massively Inefficient: Web pages are bloated with data that AI agents simply don’t need. An agent tasked with finding a flight price has to download and process high-resolution images, complex CSS files, and interactive JavaScript—all designed for human presentation. This wastes immense computational power, bandwidth, and time, making tasks slower and more expensive than they need to be.
A Major Security Blindspot: This is the most alarming issue. Granting an AI agent full control over your web browser is a profound security risk. The browser has access to your cookies, saved passwords, personal files, and browsing history. A compromised or malicious agent could easily exploit this access to steal sensitive data or take unauthorized actions on your behalf. It’s the digital equivalent of giving a stranger a key to your house and hoping they only go into the living room.
A Blueprint for the Future: The Agentic Web Stack
Instead of building better workarounds, we need to build a new, parallel infrastructure for the web that is inherently machine-readable and secure. This proposed “Open Agentic Web Stack” is built on two core components.
1. Agentic HTML (AHTML): The Machine-Readable Web
Imagine a version of a website that isn’t a visual layout but a structured, self-describing manual. That’s the concept behind Agentic HTML (AHTML). It’s a format that would exist alongside regular HTML, explicitly defining the elements, data, and actions available on a page.
For example, on an e-commerce site, the AHTML would clearly state:
- Component:
product_search_form - Data Field:
query(text input) - Action:
submit_search
With AHTML, the AI agent doesn’t need to guess where the search bar is. It reads a clear, stable set of instructions, making its interaction dramatically more reliable and robust.
2. Agentic Transport Protocol (ATP): Secure and Efficient Communication
To communicate with these new machine-readable sites, agents need a new protocol—an Agentic Transport Protocol (ATP). This would be a lightweight and secure communication standard designed for agents, not browsers.
ATP would handle interactions far more efficiently than the current HTTP/S protocol. More importantly, it would have security and verification built-in from the ground up. ATP could include features like:
- Capability-Based Access: Websites can grant agents specific, limited permissions (e.g., “permission to search flights but not to book them”).
- Sandboxing: Agents are confined to their specific tasks and cannot access other data on your system.
- Integrated Payments: The protocol could natively support micropayments, allowing agents to pay for API calls or data access securely.
What This New Web Looks Like in Practice
Adopting an agentic stack would fundamentally transform how AI interacts with the internet, leading to tangible benefits for users, developers, and businesses.
- Unprecedented Robustness: AI agents would perform tasks with near-perfect reliability, as they would be interacting with a stable API, not a constantly changing user interface.
- Blazing-Fast Speed and Efficiency: By cutting out the bloat of visual rendering, agents could execute tasks in a fraction of the time, using significantly fewer resources.
- Fortified Security and Control: Users could confidently deploy AI agents, knowing their interactions are governed by strict, verifiable permissions, eliminating the risk of unauthorized data access.
This shift is not unlike the transition from screen-scraping to the widespread adoption of REST APIs. APIs provided a stable, structured way for applications to communicate, unleashing a wave of innovation. The Open Agentic Web Stack is the next logical step in that evolution, creating a true, functional web for machines.
Security Tips for the Current AI Landscape
While this new stack is being developed, it’s crucial to remain vigilant. If you use AI tools or browser extensions that automate web tasks, follow these security best practices:
- Audit Permissions: Be extremely cautious about what permissions you grant to browser extensions. Only provide access that is absolutely necessary for the tool to function.
- Use Sandboxed Environments: For any experimental or untrusted AI agent, consider running it in a virtual machine or a separate browser profile with no access to your personal accounts.
- Apply the Principle of Least Privilege: Never grant an automated tool more access than it needs. If a tool only needs to read a page, do not give it permission to write or modify data.
The future of the web will be navigated not just by people, but by our AI partners. Building a secure, efficient, and reliable foundation for them is not just an opportunity for innovation—it’s a necessity for a safe and functional digital future.
Source: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/agent-factory-designing-the-open-agentic-web-stack/
