Building for trillions of agents (X article)
- Source: https://x.com/i/status/2030714592238956960
- Author: Aaron Levie
- Clipped: 2026-03-09 (SGT)
TL;DR
Levie argues software is entering an agent-first era: organizations may run 100x–1000x more agents than people, so future products must be designed for agent usability (APIs, automation interfaces, machine-operable workflows), not only human UX.
Key points
- Agents are rapidly evolving from chatbot assistants into persistent workers with tools, code execution, memory, and sandboxed compute.
- Adoption is spreading beyond coding into broad knowledge work (contracts, support, audits, research, sales materials, web transactions).
- Net effect is not only substitution of existing tasks, but expansion of total work done (more simulations, prototypes, analyses).
- This could produce enterprises with orders-of-magnitude more agents than employees.
- Strategic shift: “make something agents want” (analogous to “make something people want”).
- Product implication: become strongly API-first and machine-operable:
- complete API coverage,
- CLI/MCP support,
- clean and deterministic interfaces,
- programmatic account and lifecycle operations.
- Business model implication: seat-based pricing may be insufficient; agent-native usage likely pushes toward consumption/volume-based models.
- New infrastructure opportunities: agent compute/sandboxes, agent data/memory systems, identity, communication, payments, security/governance/compliance.
Why this matters
The essay frames a practical roadmap for builders: if agents become primary software users, competitive advantage shifts from human-centric UX alone to agent interoperability, reliability, and governance at scale.