The Age of Agent Experience

Not to take the bait on this bit of content marketing ("the future of agents is OAuth, says company that sells OAuth solution"), but: I disagree with the premise that agents should basically use the same APIs and auth mechanisms that humans & apps currently use.

I realize there's a strong impulse to not "reinvent the wheel," but what we have currently is unsustainable. Specifically, the fact that every API uses a slightly different REST API and its own unique authentication & authorization workflow. It worked fine for the days when application developers would spend a few weeks on each new integration, but it totally breaks down when you want to be able to orchestrate an agent across many user-defined services.

I think a simple protocol based on JSON and bog-standard public key encryption could allow agents to coordinate and spend credits/money based on human-defined budgets.

And the agent actually works for a large corporation with zero fiduciary duty to the user.

There are a few layers to this worth considering.

- In this world the information delivered to agents should align with content delivered visibly to the human web. This is essentially how the bulk of SEO overloading is detected. There needs to be a way to validate this and establish trust - completely solvable. These techniques penalize these schemes from the outset. (this is probably not the best forum to go too deep into that)

- We're assuming agents have full buying decisions here. I do not believe we will see that as common place for a long time. Even if we did, the same systems for PCA compliance are in play and the interfaces pushed by both payment gateways and shopping carts protect against duplicate purchase attempts. Those attempting to abuse this fall more into the malicious actor camp.

- phishing and malicious actors are going to do what they have always done. There are some very important security, access control, and compliance measures we should put in place for the most sensitive of actions - as we always have where most existing ones still apply. The agent experience and the ecosystem in general will have to evolve to have verifiable trust patterns. So that when a human delegates to an agent to do something, the human can have confidence and ways to validate interactions.

I'll be the first to admit that I don't have all of the answers here but with agents becoming the new entry point or delegation tool for the next generation of digital users, these are questions we have to answer and solve for. It starts by focusing the industry around the domain of this problem, that is AX. How to do it effectively and what needs to evolve to achieve it... that's where the work is.

for anything more complex than single throw-this-data-there, probably a wizzard-like workflow would be better. The client initiates it but then the server leads it instead of being 100% passive, e.g. "enter (date|name)" >Then> "enter (amount & currency)" >Then> whatever-else. i am not sure if any such thing exists as protocol; usual REST APIs are just an alphabet with client-driven alphabet-punching that can be combinatorially applied without any order ; the server may very well know the correct order but cannot elegantly enforce it.

I think OAuth can complement computer use. Imagine if an agent went through an OAuth flow to get an access token, and was able to use that access token to interact with the same UI that a human interacted with. You'd get a few benefits:

- The human wouldn't need to share their password information with the agent

- Services would be able to block or ask for approval when agents take sensitive actions. Maybe an e-commerce site is happy to let an agent browse and add items to a cart, but wants a human in the loop for checkout.

- Services would be able to attribute any actions taken to the agent on behalf of the user. Did Joe approve this expense report, or did Joe's agent approve this expense report?