Do you need to agentify your product?

• 1. Traditional manual products. Most companies are still here. Standard UIs, manual workflows, forms, dashboards, documents, and information spread across different tools.
• 2. Agent for the product. Many companies are now adding agents as a new interface layer. Sometimes for narrow use cases, like searching docs or drafting text. Sometimes as a broader way to interact with the whole product from places like Slack, Teams, or Discord. Vercel's recent Chat SDK launch points in this direction.
• 3. Product for the agent. This is where things get really interesting. A smaller group of companies build products that agents can use directly through MCP servers or CLIs. We are already seeing this (specially for devs) with Claude Code plugins, ClawHub skills, and Codex plugins.
• The key is shared context. LLMs are only as useful as the context they can access and use effectively. Imagine agents that can:
• access the full context of a company, including transactions, conversations, CRM data, and metrics
• identify and select the most relevant context for each task. I believe this is the area that needs to improve the most.
• use any productive tool, whether that means code, contracts, presentations, email
• This does not mean traditional UIs become useless in every case. I still want to open my banking app and see my balance without having to ask an agent. But I do think most companies will be pushed to adapt to this shift in one way or another.
• For that to happen, agent inference costs need to make sense, which I believe they already do for many productive use cases. At the same time, the pricing model for many SaaS products will likely have to evolve from seat-based pricing to more usage-based or outcome-based models.

Originally published in CTO Circle Issue 002.