We spent years obsessing over building “great apps.” Slick interfaces. Clean dashboards. Beautiful onboarding flows. But let’s be honest: users don’t care about your app. They care about the result. And if someone else—especially an AI agent—can deliver that result faster, cheaper, and without friction, then your interface? Your buttons? Your whole product? It’s already obsolete.
“We’re in the Agent Era”—Satya Nadella
In a recent interview that quickly made its way across Twitter, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella dropped a line that every builder should tattoo on their forehead:
“We’re in the agent era. This isn’t about better chatbots. It’s about fundamentally rewiring how humans interact with technology.”
That’s not just a soundbite. It’s a warning. Because the app layer, as we know it, is collapsing. What’s rising in its place is something smarter, more invisible, more outcome-focused: Workflows powered by intelligent agents.
Apps Are for Users. Workflows Are for Results.
Let’s say you built a sleek invoicing app for freelancers. Great UX, intuitive design, mobile-friendly. Congrats. But guess what the freelancer actually wants? Not an “experience.” They want to get paid faster.
Now imagine an AI agent that scans their calendar, pulls project info, drafts the invoice, sends it, follows up on late payments, and does all this without the freelancer lifting a finger. No app to open. No form to fill. No learning curve. Just results. In the agent era, your app isn’t the product anymore. The workflow is.
Why This Matters for African Builders
According to the GSMA Mobile Economy 2024 report, smartphone adoption in Sub-Saharan Africa crossed 50% in 2023, but app engagement still lags far behind global averages. That’s not just a UX issue. It’s a signal. People don’t want to manage more tools. They want to do less and get more.
In regions where data is expensive, time is limited, and trust is hard-earned, automated, agent-powered workflows are not just efficient—they’re essential.
What You Should Be Building Instead
Let’s stop building more apps for people to use. Start building systems that:
- Automate workflows end-to-end: Build tools that handle an entire task from trigger to completion—without requiring user intervention at every step.
- Integrate with agent ecosystems (think Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude): Ensure your product can communicate with and enhance AI agents already embedded in your users’ environments.
- Use APIs instead of UI to do the heavy lifting: Shift the work from visible features to backend APIs that agents or other systems can tap into programmatically.
- Disappear into the background, surfacing only when needed: Design tools that quietly operate behind the scenes and only prompt users when human input is necessary.
Because the next billion-dollar business won’t come from a prettier dashboard. It’ll come from a seamless, invisible workflow that just works, powered by the data and tasks your user already has.
The Future Isn’t Features. It’s Outcomes.
As agent infrastructure gets better, the cost of intelligence drops to near-zero. That means everyone will have access to AI-powered operations, and the only thing that matters is who delivers the outcome faster. If you’re still shipping apps, good luck. But if you’re designing workflows that run themselves, plug into agents, and generate results with almost no user input. You’re building the future. And that future starts now.
