New innovations are hitting both marketers and consumers at an unprecedented pace, prompting a key question: Are we truly prepared for the agentic web? To get there, we first need to explore a few related questions: What exactly is the agentic web? How can it be applied in practice? What benefits and drawbacks does it bring? This article is not a call for AI skeptics to drop their valid concerns about the agentic web, nor is it meant to judge how you, whether as a consumer or a professional, choose to interact with it. Given how polarized opinions are, the goal here is to offer a straightforward way to think about the agentic web, stripped of hype, branding, and marketing spin. Disclosure: I work at Microsoft and support the direction Microsoft is taking with the agentic web. Even so, this article will strive to remain as platform-neutral as possible. What is the agentic web? The agentic web describes advanced tools, or agents, that learn from our preferences and, with our permission, carry out tasks that would otherwise be tedious or time-consuming. Put simply, when I use one-click checkout, I’m authorizing my stored payment details to be transmitted to the merchant’s accounts receivable system. Neither the merchant nor I need to manually enter every detail or do anything more than agree to send and receive the payment. For fun, I posed this question to four different AI models, and their answers are revealing: Copilot: “The agentic web is an…