The Active Web

There is a mistake people make when they think about AI agents. They treat them as features—as smart chatbots you add to a website. But if you look at the history of the web, something much larger is happening. We are watching the second great platform shift, and it is making the first one look surprisingly static. For the last twenty-five years, the fundamental unit of the internet was the website.

A website is essentially digital real estate. It is a place you go. You visit a URL, you read information, and if you are motivated, you fill out a form to capture your intent. But the website itself does nothing. It waits. It is passive. In the era of the website, the human does the work.

We are now entering the era of the workflow.

A workflow is not a place you visit; it is a thing that visits you. It is not digital real estate; it is a digital workforce. If a website’s job was to inform, a workflow’s job is to execute.

Consider the difference between booking a flight in 2010 and 2030. In 2010, you went to a website, searched for dates, compared prices, and entered your credit card. You were the operator of the software. In the near future, you will simply have an intent—“get me to San Francisco by Tuesday morning”—and a workflow will execute that intent. It will search, compare, book, and add it to your calendar.

This sounds like a subtle difference, but it changes everything about how businesses are built.

In 2000, the defining question for a business was, "Do you have a website?" If you didn't, you were invisible. You had no way to capture intent. By 2030, the defining question will be, "Do you have a Service Architecture?"

A Service Architecture is simply a set of autonomous workflows that run your business. It is the difference between having a filing cabinet and having a clerk. One holds information; the other uses it.

But there is a problem. We don’t have the infrastructure for this yet.

When the web was young, hosting a website was a nightmare. You had to buy a physical server, install Apache, and keep it running. It was expensive and difficult. Then companies like Hostinger and later Vercel appeared. They solved the "deployment problem." They made it possible for a teenager to deploy a global application for ten dollars a month. They offered managed self-hosting: the convenience of a service with the sovereignty of ownership.

We are currently in the "physical server" phase of workflows.

Right now, if you want to build a complex agentic workflow, you have two bad choices. You can pay a fortune for a closed ecosystem like Zapier, which is easy but traps your data. Or you can self-host open-source tools like n8n or Temporal, which gives you control but forces you to become a DevOps engineer.

There is a vacuum in the middle. The market is waiting for the Vercel of workflows.

This matters because AI is different from HTML. You could afford to let your HTML sit on someone else’s server. But AI processes your proprietary data, your customer lists, your internal strategy. As these workflows become more intelligent, the desire for data sovereignty will rise. Companies will want the ease of SaaS, but they will demand the control of self-hosting.

The companies that win the next decade won’t just be the ones with the best AI models. They will be the ones who build the infrastructure that allows the rest of us to deploy them.

We are moving from a web that waits for us to a web that works for us. And just as the website boom created giants, the workflow boom will too. But only for those who realize that the website is no longer the main event.