4. Web agents will go mainstream, becoming the next major killer application in consumer AI.
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Plus
20
Ṁ2029
2026
76%
chance
  • All these predictions are taken from Forbes/Rob Toews' "10 AI Predictions For 2025".

  • For the 2024 predictions you can find them here, and their resolution here.

  • You can find all the markets under the tag [2025 Forbes AI predictions].

  • Note that I will resolve to whatever Forbes/Rob Toews say in their resolution article for 2025's predictions, even if I or others disagree with his decision.

  • I might bet in this market, as I have no power over the resolution.


Description of this prediction from the article:
Imagine a world in which you never have to directly interact with the web. Whenever you need to manage a subscription, pay a bill, schedule a doctor’s appointment, order something on Amazon, make a restaurant reservation, or complete any other tedious online task, you can simply instruct an AI assistant to do so on your behalf.

This concept of a “web agent” has been around for years. If something like this existed and worked, there is little doubt that it would be a wildly successful product. Yet no functioning general-purpose web agent is available on the market today.

Startups like Adept—which raised hundreds of millions of dollars with a highly pedigreed founding team but failed to deliver on its vision—have become cautionary tales in this category.

Next year will be the year that web agents finally start working well enough to go mainstream. Continued advances in language and vision foundation models, paired with recent breakthroughs on “System 2 thinking” capabilities as a result of new reasoning models and inference-time compute, will mean that web agents will be ready for primetime.

(In other words, Adept had the right idea; it was just too early. In startups, as in much in life, timing is everything.)

Web agents will find all sorts of valuable enterprise use cases, but the biggest near-term market opportunity for web agents will be with consumers. Despite all the recent AI fervor, relatively few AI-native applications beyond ChatGPT have yet broken through to become mainstream consumer successes. Web agents will change that, becoming the next true “killer app” in consumer AI.

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