Since its inception, Netlify has helped pioneer modern web development and has worked with the ecosystem to push new frontiers. Not just because we want to, but because it helps the industry move forward and allows us to advance our company’s vision of making a better web.
It might seem obvious now that frontend and backend systems should be decoupled, changes should have ephemeral environments, infrastructure should be inferred from code, functions should also work at the edge of the network, and so on. What’s common place now was novel and hard to achieve when we were pioneering these practices. We’re proud to see these concepts propagate across the industry.
We’re at another moment in time where we see big questions being asked, experimentation being performed, and hearing rumblings of a larger tectonic shift. We believe the next important chapter for modern web and the technology industry as a whole is a focus on Agent Experience (AX) - check out the article where Netlify CEO first coined this concept. Agent Experience is the “experience” that agents have while working directly or indirectly with content we produce or systems we expose. Just as user experience (UX) and developer experience (DX) transformed how we use and build technology, AX is about enabling AI agents to work easily with people, websites and tools.
We’ve also experienced the benefit of this focus directly. Netlify has been chosen as the deploy target for the agents of industry leading partners such as Devin, Bolt.new, Stripe, and more. When we step back and assess why we were selected, the steps we’ve taken have added up to not just great DX for our partners but exceptional AX for their AI agents to work with. Good AX is driving adoption for tools, content, and services.
AX is a fascinating and multi-dimensional opportunity for the industry and the web to tackle. On one side, we will need agents to be able to work very well with the tools and platforms we provide as more developers use AI systems to help them with code generation and system integration. On the other side, we will need to ensure that agent consumption of the web is mutually beneficial for humans and agents without the massive negatives the web has felt because of agents. Every time we solve one of these challenges, we will be compounding the total value of bringing agents and the web together - a massive win for people on the other side of these AI tools, website creators, and the providers building these capabilities.
At Netlify, we’re establishing this focus for the industry and for ourselves. We’re going to ensure that Netlify is delivering exceptional AX so that our customers can use us directly and through the usage of tools and agents. Through our research and collaborations with partners and customers, we will be helping push the practices that allow customers and the industry as a whole to advance forward to deliver exceptional UX, DX, and, now, AX.
