The customer sent their agent

In the headlines this month, Amazon shut Meta's new shopping agent, Muse, out of its store. The reasons were pointed at the fact that the agent didn't identify itself as it browsed and appeared to be holding customers' login details. It looks like a retail standoff, but it previews a question every brand will soon face, when an AI agent arrives acting for a customer, do you let it in, and on what terms?  

Just days earlier, Salesforce had moved from the opposite instinct, launching a platform that hands agents a governed way in rather than keeping them out, under the banner “AI replaces the UI - a live interface layer that takes the data, workflows, business logic, permissions, and governance inside your org and pushes them out to whatever tool your team already uses.” 

This is where our series has been heading and where the loop closes on moving from content to context. Having looked at organising what a brand knows, then the processes that run on it, we reach the interface: where agents, customers and your brand meet. And it's here the relationship is increasingly decided, because the agent now often reaches you before the customer does.

Decide your position on agents 

Most organisations haven't settled whether they welcome agents, or how they'd even recognise one arriving. Work out which agent-led journeys you want to serve; a purchase, a booking, a support query; and which to route elsewhere or decline. A clear position is a strategic choice, not a technical setting. 

Build doors, not just walls 

An agent left to guess its way through a page built for human eyes is slow and easily misled. Better to give agents defined, permissioned ways to act on the journeys that matter, calling a named action rather than scraping a screen. The interface their agents actually reach for is the one worth engineering. 

Design for the moment the agent acts.  

When an agent completes something for a customer, your brand still has to show up as itself. Design the points where a person steps back in such as a confirmation before a purchase, a handover when judgement matters, and make sure your voice and rules travel into surfaces you don't own. Your design system belongs here too, as machine-readable context an agent draws on to represent you. 

Get this layer right and the interface becomes where your brand is most itself, not least. That closes our series on the move from content to context, though the conversation it opens is only starting.