Building the Second Web

In the last piece, we explored how AI agents will change brand engagement by redefining B2B as a new mess of Brand-to-Bot, Bot-to-Brand, and Bot-to-Bot. This piece picks up where that left off.

As AI agents take on more tasks—discovery, filtering, decision-making—they need infrastructure built for them. And, with that need, the web itself is splitting:

1. The visible web, still built for humans.
2. The invisible one, now emerging, is being built for bots.

And during this season of developer conferences—Microsoft Build, Google I/O, Confluent Current, and others—the tools and platforms (and acronym soups) are dropping.

A New Stack for a New Web

At Microsoft Build, we saw the foundation of this new web is taking shape around two major components:

• Natural Language Web (NLWeb): A new protocol that gives agents access to semantic, structured content on websites. Instead of parsing HTML designed for humans, agents will interpret meaning natively.
  
   
• Model Context Protocol (MCP): A system that lets agents securely interact with apps, APIs, and data sources—pulling in context from subscription services, drives, and other connected systems and enabling personalized, agent-initiated actions across the web.

At Google I/O, they announced developer initiatives include Project Astra, its next-gen AI interface, and its growing integration of LearnLM to help agents learn from user behavior.

Together, these protocols and initiatives are framing what we could call the Agentic Stack—and it is the key foundation for the big tech companies to win the AI integration race.

Watch the MAPs

Now that the agentic web is coming into focus, it’s time for brands to start releasing their experiments and explorations—and with that we’re entering the age of the MAP: Minimum Agentic Product.

Just like MVPs were the buzzy phrase as brands explored their first “web 2.0 websites” that tapped into APIs, and “mobile apps” played with social graphs, and “web 3.0 apps” that did whatever they were trying to do (looking at you Nike .SWOOSH), MAPs will become a brand’s first playground for agentic actions.

The first MAPs are already emerging, where agents already need access but struggle with today’s web:

• Booking and scheduling for events, restaurants, travel, and more
• Product discovery and purchasing, like the recent AI commerce push from Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal
• Service comparisons for phone plans, insurance, SaaS products, and more
• Knowledge interfaces for agent-to-agent attempts to resolve customer issues before escalating to humans

And, of course, there will be marketing stunts, brand mashups, and April Fool’s pranks. Because, because.

Things We Humans Can Try Now

While much of the agentic web is still being built, we can already try early prototypes.

Google’s Project Mariner is a new experiment in human-agent interaction inside Chrome.

Their first examples include:

• Finding personalized jobs: 
  using information from a resume to find personalized job listings
   
• Hiring a tasker to build furniture: 
  navigating to an email inbox, finding a recent furniture order, and then goes to TaskRabbit to find a tasker that can help assemble the item.
   
• Ordering missing ingredients: 
  looking through Google Drive to find a family recipe, note which ingredients the user is missing, and navigate to Instacart to purchase missing ingredients.

Joining Google is Opera with Neon, a new “fully agentic” browser that can surf the web for us.

And both of them (and many other MAPs that emerge every day) are joining the agentic browser OG: OpenAI’s Operator. (It is the “OG” because it was released waaay back in January.)

(Re)Building an Open Web

Last thought.

This agentic web is still forming. And yes, many of its standards and protocols are being shaped by the usual tech giants. But there’s a chance to get it right this time.

As Anil Dash recently wrote, this shift is a chance to reimagine what we once tried to build with Web 2.0.

His piece—“Web 2.0 2.0”—outlines how the open, creative, human-first ideals of early social platforms were lost to walled gardens.

This time, with agents doing the navigating, we need a new kind of openness. One that prioritizes the interoperability, accessibility, and structure we tried to build 20 years ago with Web 2.0 ideals.

Because for the new B2B to meet its glorious potential, that future must live in an open, agentic web.