The Chatbots and Agents Are Going to Merge

The Gist

• Chatbots are becoming agents. AI assistants are evolving from answering questions to completing tasks, allowing users to move from research to action without leaving the conversation.
• The chat window may become the new interface. AI companies envision assistants that can browse, communicate, purchase, schedule and execute workflows across websites and applications on a user's behalf.
• Trust will determine adoption. The success of agentic AI depends less on technical capability and more on whether users are willing to grant AI systems access to sensitive data and decision-making authority.

There are two core generative AI uses today: Chatbots and agents. The bots make sense of information. The agents take control of your computer and get things done for you. The two seem distinct, but they'll likely soon merge.

Table of Contents

• From Answers to Actions: The Rise of Agentic Chatbots
• Why AI Labs Want to Keep Users Inside the Chat Window
• The Super App Future Depends on Trust

From Answers to Actions: The Rise of Agentic Chatbots

When you use a chatbot to research hotels, experiences, or companies, the bot, with your permission, will one day almost certainly take control of your browser to reserve a room for you, email a service provider for more information, or even purchase a company's stock. The bot will suggest these actions as you chat with it. Then, upon approval, it will take command and get to work.

Why AI Labs Want to Keep Users Inside the Chat Window

Today's AI labs, already seeing the value of autonomous actions in coding, view you leaving the chat window as somewhat unnecessary, and they seem ready to complete the circuit. They want their chatbots, effectively, to intuit your next move and accomplish it for you.

OpenAI, for instance, is building a "super app" for autonomous coding in Codex, but that concept will soon broaden beyond code. The updated Codex app includes an autonomous coding tool, a browser it can make use of, and an instance of ChatGPT. But the ambition extends to the core ChatGPT application itself.

"We are busy bringing ChatGPT to Codex so that we can bring Codex to ChatGPT," said OpenAI engineer Thibault Sottiaux on X recently. "One day this will make sense."

When you're researching a service, let's say a child's birthday party entertainer, ChatGPT might, for instance, suggest some possible hires and then compose and send emails to them inquiring about availability and price. If the clown or magician meets your specifications, the bot could then confirm them, and maybe even run a background check. Just set the parameters, approve the language, and move on to your next chat.

Chatbot actions may soon extend far beyond today's conceivable use cases, potentially to areas like stock trading. Robinhood, for example, just built an integration that allows users to delegate their trading decisions to AI bots. But soon, when researching a company in a chatbot, the bot might offer to buy shares for you. It might even help shape an investment strategy, get a budget, and execute it while you wait.

Boris Cherney, the head of Claude Code at Anthropic, told me on Big Technology Podcast that the company is experimenting with more proactive versions of its conversational AI chatbot. "We're trying all these different experiments," he said. "There's some stuff that we're trying that's like this."

Related Article: The Contact Center's New MVP? AI Chatbots That Know When to Escalate

The Super App Future Depends on Trust

To be sure, this product vision will only be realized if people trust the AI labs to do the right thing with their data. And given the polling right now, that could be tough.

But chatbots that go beyond the chat window are certainly on their way. And should they catch on, they will have a profound impact on the web and the services built around it, potentially becoming central hubs for all computing. Outside websites and apps would be there for fact checking and triple confirming certain details only.

The term "super app," though initially sounding like a misnomer, is therefore the right way to describe the ambition. In places like China, a super app is a social network, payments tool and ride hailing service, all in one. The new agent-chatbots could sync with all the same programs, and potentially do much more. This is the bull case for AI in contact centers and enterprise software broadly, and it's not a totally inconceivable story. It's likely the narrative OpenAI and Anthropic will take to Wall Street en route to trillion-dollar IPOs.

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