Recently, while discussing AI-assisted development with the team, the conversation veered into a bigger question: if all software eventually supports Agents, do the apps we’re building today still matter?

It sounds alarmist at first. But think about it, and it sends a chill down your spine.

The Twilight of the Attention Economy

For the past twenty years, the internet’s business model boils down to one word: attention.

Wherever eyeballs linger, money flows. To capture that attention, we’ve built endless “optimizations”: infinite-scroll feeds, addictive recommendation algorithms, irresistible notification systems, and that red dot you can never dismiss. Every product manager obsesses over the same question: how do I keep users in my app one second longer?

This logic worked. Users open Taobao to buy a charging cable and end up buying three extra outfits. Users open TikTok to watch one video and lose two hours. Those “accidental” minutes of engagement are the breeding ground for ads and conversions.

But Agents upend this logic entirely.

Picture this: a user tells their Agent, “Buy me a Type-C fast-charging cable, 100W, don’t overpay.” The Agent compares prices, places the order, done. The whole process takes under 30 seconds. The user never opens a single e-commerce app.

Those carefully designed product recommendations? The Agent ignores them. Those enticing promotional banners? The Agent doesn’t care. Those “you might also like” algorithms? Just noise to an Agent.

The user’s attention collapses from “browse-compare-decide” to “give instruction-confirm result.”

So when attention is no longer the scarce resource, what takes its place?

The Rise of the ROI Economy

I call the new business logic driven by Agents the ROI Economy.

To understand this, you need to think about what underlies the Agent economy.

In the attention economy, the core resource is user time. User time is finite; whoever captures more of it monetizes more ads and conversions. So everyone competes on user experience, content recommendations, and those addictive red dots.

But in the Agent economy, the core resource shifts. User demand no longer converts to dwell time – it converts to tokens.

A user says “book me a flight.” That sentence gets tokenized, fed into a model, the model inference burns compute, compute burns electricity. The Agent calls airline APIs, compares prices, makes decisions, returns results – every step in the chain consumes tokens, and behind tokens are GPUs, and behind GPUs is electricity.

User demand -> Tokens -> Compute -> Energy

This chain dictates the Agent economy’s underlying logic: every interaction’s cost can be priced in energy.

This is fundamentally different from the attention economy. In the attention economy, cost structures are fuzzy – a user scrolling TikTok for ten extra minutes costs TikTok nearly nothing at the margin. But in the Agent economy, every interaction has a clear cost: one more question burns another batch of tokens, another unit of electricity.

When costs can be precisely measured, returns must be precisely measured too. This is why the Agent era is inevitably an ROI economy – not because users became more rational, but because the entire system’s foundation is an energy ledger.

From this vantage point, several interesting corollaries emerge:

First, Agents will naturally gravitate toward “good enough.”

Every extra conversation turn, every extra API call, every extra comparison consumes tokens. An efficient Agent won’t aimlessly help you “browse” – it’ll complete the task with minimal tokens. This isn’t a design choice; it’s economic law. Whoever completes the same task with less energy has a cost advantage.

Second, user demand will be forcibly “structured.”

Natural language is flexible but wasteful with tokens. “Find me a restaurant, not too expensive, preferably with a private room, close to the office” – this sentence is full of ambiguity, requiring multiple clarification rounds. The future trend: users will learn to express needs more precisely, or Agents will guide structured input. Either way, the goal is the same – reduce token waste.

Third, “information overload” will be replaced by “compute overload.”

In the attention economy era, the user’s pain point was too much information. In the Agent economy, the pain point becomes: this task is too complex for the Agent to handle, or it can handle it but at too high a cost. Imagine asking an Agent for a deep industry research report, and it responds: “This task will consume approximately 500,000 tokens, costing about $15. Proceed?”

When every interaction has a clear price tag, users naturally start calculating: is this need worth that price? That’s the essence of the ROI economy – it’s not the Agent calculating ROI for you; it’s the entire system forcing everyone to calculate ROI.

From Attention to ROI: The Migration of Value Capture Points

Understanding why the ROI economy is inevitable, let’s examine its impact on existing apps.

Take a typical e-commerce app. Current monetization logic looks roughly like this:

  1. Spend money to acquire traffic
  2. Use various tactics to retain users, increasing browse time
  3. Insert ad placements along the user’s browsing path
  4. Improve conversion rates through recommendation algorithms

Every step depends on user “dwell time.” But in the Agent era, steps 2 and 3 get cut entirely.

Agents don’t “browse.” Agents just “buy.”

What does this mean? The app’s value shifts from “traffic gateway” to “supply interface.” Users no longer need your UI – they just need your API.

Who Becomes the New Gateway?

If Agents become the new gateway, the question is: who gets to be that Agent?

Looking at the current landscape, several potential players emerge:

OS-level Agents: Apple Intelligence, Google Assistant – system-level AI assistants that naturally occupy the device gateway. A user speaks one sentence to Siri, and the task is done. No need to open any third-party app.

Super App Agents: If WeChat or Alipay nail their Agent experience, their existing ecosystem lock-in could make them gateways. After all, users’ payments, social connections, and mini-programs are all there, giving the Agent a rich set of capabilities to call upon.

Independent Agents: Claude, ChatGPT – general-purpose AI products that compete on capability and trust. Users are willing to hand their needs to an AI that’s smart enough and trustworthy enough.

Vertical Agents: Domain-specific Agents for law, healthcare, finance, etc. They compete on depth, providing professional-grade services in specific areas.

Regardless of type, the core competitive advantage is the same: who does the user trust to make decisions on their behalf.

This is far harder than capturing attention. Attention can be grabbed with tricks, but trust must be accumulated over time. Having users let you spend their money, make their choices, handle their sensitive information – that’s not something any random app can achieve.

Paths Forward for Existing Apps

So what should existing apps actually do? Lie down and wait?

Of course not. But they need to think clearly about their positioning.

Path one: become the Agent’s backend.

Give up the UI, focus on the API. The Agent needs your capabilities to complete tasks, so do the supply-side work well. An airline doesn’t need a beautiful app – it just needs solid APIs for flight search, booking, and rebooking that any Agent can call.

The problem: you become a commoditized supplier. When every airline provides an API, what does the Agent use to recommend? Price, on-time rate, or who offers the highest commission?

Path two: data or supply-side monopoly.

If you have exclusive content, exclusive inventory, or exclusive capabilities, Agents can’t bypass you. Think: copyrighted content platforms, scarce goods suppliers, licensed service providers. No matter how capable the Agent, it can’t conjure your proprietary assets out of thin air.

But the bar is too high for most apps.

Path three: high-value human-computer interaction.

Some things users simply want to do themselves. Gaming, social, creative work – the value in these domains lies precisely in the human experience, not efficiency. Having an Agent play your game for you defeats the purpose.

Entertainment and social apps may be the least disrupted category in the Agent era. Because the user’s need isn’t “complete a task” – it’s “enjoy the process.”

Path four: compliance and trust intermediary.

In some domains, even if the Agent can do it, users won’t trust it to. Financial transactions, medical diagnoses, legal consultations – these require someone to vouch. The Agent can suggest, but execution may still need a trusted third party for oversight.

Banking apps probably won’t disappear, but their role will shift from “transaction gateway” to “transaction confirmation and compliance.”

Path five: become an Agent yourself.

The hardest path, but the highest payoff. If you can transform from an app into an Agent, you move from “callee” to “gateway.”

But the required capabilities are completely different. Building an app requires product design, user experience, growth hacking. Building an Agent requires AI capabilities, intent understanding, task orchestration. This isn’t a UI tweak.

A Counterintuitive Observation

At this point, an interesting question came to mind.

If all Agents recommend based on ROI, what happens?

Suppose a user says “book me the best value hotel.” The Agent recommends what? Theoretically, the cheapest one with the highest ratings.

But if every Agent recommends this way, what’s the result?

That “best value” hotel gets flooded by every Agent, then either raises prices, drops quality, or sells out. Other hotels, lacking exposure, can only cut prices to compete for Agent recommendations.

This leads to extreme commoditization and price wars on the supply side.

The end result: all hotels converge on similar prices, similar service, similar experiences. Differentiation disappears. Margins disappear.

This might actually create new opportunities:

  • Preference matching: not “cheapest” but “best fit for you.” Agents need to understand personal preferences, not just compare prices.
  • Experience premium: some things are expensive, but users will pay for the experience. Agents need to learn to recommend what’s “worth it,” not just what’s “cheap.”
  • Brand trust: when an Agent recommends an unknown brand, users hesitate. Brands still carry value in the Agent era – the expression of that value just changes.

Implications for App Developers

As an engineer who’s spent many years in mobile development, I can’t help but wonder: if the Agent strips away the UI layer’s value, what are we competing on?

First, backend capabilities become more important. When users no longer need your interface, your only value is your data and services. API design, service reliability, response speed – these invisible things become the core competitive advantage.

Second, end-to-end experience still matters, just in a different form. Users may no longer “use” your app, but they’ll “invoke” your service through an Agent. Whether that invocation experience is good, the response fast, the result accurate – these are the new user experience.

Finally, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Gateways in the Agent era may be fragmented – Claude today, something else tomorrow. Build your core capabilities so every Agent can call on you. That’s safer than betting on any single Agent.

Closing Thoughts

Back to the opening question: when Agents become the gateway, where do apps go?

My answer: apps won’t disappear, but they’ll retreat backstage.

What users see is the Agent, but behind the Agent are the capabilities of various apps. These capabilities just no longer appear as “interfaces” – they exist as “services.”

For developers, this is both challenge and opportunity. The challenge: moats built on UI and growth hacking may get swept away. The opportunity: apps with genuine core capabilities can actually reach more users through Agents.

After all, no matter how powerful an Agent is, someone has to supply the ammunition.

The question is: are you ready to be that arsenal?