From browser to buyer: why the shift from assistants to agents matters

Hot on the heels of OpenAI’s Atlas, launched last week, Microsoft has joined the agentic browser wars with a host of new features built into Copilot Mode for Edge.

Much like Perplexity’s frontrunner, Comet, these browsers are designed to become your intelligent AI agent that follows you around the web, seeing and reasoning over your open tabs, finding info, making comparisons and recommendations, and even completing (some) tasks.

Essentially, it’s using natural language to complete entire workflows. 

So why the hype, and what does this mean?

Journeys, not sessions: designing for agent-led flows

The ambition is that tabs and websites will largely become a thing of the past, with multiple agents completing tasks on the user's behalf, bringing curated content, products and solutions directly to the agentic browser, stripping out ads and superfluous information. And the fact that the AI memory will reside within the browser points to an ever more personalised and proactive experience, complete with contextual nuances, creating a huge consideration for consent and governance.

The much-cited ‘death of the browser’ prediction feels a step closer. Albeit in the context of ‘long live the agentic browser’.

From search to found

Consumer behaviour is changing. Search was never really about the process of searching; rather, it was about getting to the outcome - finding the answer. AI enables this cognitive shortcut, so ensuring your business remains findable and relevant is critical.

Consideration will need to be given to restructuring content and style to ease citation and, subsequently, ensure that platforms are ‘agent actionable’ - exposing APIs, structured product/service data, machine-readable policies and pricing, that let agents compare, book, or configure on the user's behalf. 

Additionally, Track and pilot Model Context Protocol (MCP) to provide controlled, auditable access paths for agents.

When the browser becomes the buyer

AI is now gearing up to drive the next major shift in shopping behaviours. 

From ecommerce to mcommerce, now onto agentic or chat commerce.

As people spend more time using LLMs to search, explore, get inspiration and plan, it makes total sense that related products and services are contextually served up within the experience. One of the first steps in this logical progression was the integration of Shopify and Etsy within ChatGPT, offering customers ‘instant checkout’ powered by Stripe. 

The next iteration of this will be shopping via agentic browsers. Whereas today, people are using them for non-executional tasks, i.e. research and planning, in the future, they will complete the end-to-end process, including transactions. This means ‘agent journeys’ need to be considered and designed alongside customer journeys, so websites behave more like APIs, providing critical data allowing agents to make informed decisions and take action.

Hallucinations, infections and injections

Like all AI, agentic browsers aren’t without their faults or hallucinations, so many carry caveats about accuracy and errors. 

Recent tests show the agents sometimes claim tasks have been completed when they haven’t, or they have, but mistakes have been made, i.e. booking a restaurant table for the wrong date. So, for now, treat agentic browsing as untrusted automation, prevent unattended high-risk actions, and definitely don’t give access to banking details/allow it to make purchases anytime soon.

Additionally, these early versions of agentic browsers have a significant vulnerability to prompt injections. This occurs when an attacker embeds malicious invisible instructions on a website or within an image. When the AI assistant visits this page/content, it passes it onto the LLM, which uses text recognition AI to extract text that’s indistinguishable from the user’s prompt. The injected commands instruct the AI to use its browser tools maliciously, which could include sharing banking details or accessing emails or sensitive, personal documents.

Stay findable, stay actionable, stay safe.

As agentic browsers accelerate along the hype cycle, it’s important not to get caught out in the stampede. For anyone responsible for the business’s digital presence, it’s time to start building with agentic in mind, to navigate the new world of search to remain findable and relevant, and to enable seamless agent pathways to drive conversion in the future.