The Best Agent Makes Itself Unnecessary
Every AI agent being built right now is a digital servant. It handles your email, your meetings and your documents. But nobody is building an agent that makes you better and then gets out of the way.
The hidden assumption is that the user stays the same and the agent gets smarter. The current generation of AI agents automate your email. The next generation will do it more safely. The one after that faster. But you are still the person who can't handle your own email. The agent is a crutch! The more it does, the less you can do without it.
It is already happening. People talk about their agents like life support. "I don't know what I'd do without it." That's addiction to convenience. The API goes down, the agent hallucinates, you're offline, and you're standing in the wreckage of a life you can no longer operate manually.
Now, think about what happens when an agent handles your email for three months. It learns your patterns, your priorities, your relationships. All of that knowledge stays locked inside the agent. You've learned nothing! Now imagine an agent that, after a week, tells you that "40% of your email comes from unclear expectations set in meetings. Here are the three conversations generating the most churn. Want to work on handling them differently?" That agent is not just sorting your inbox. It's upgrading the human!
Nobody builds this because it inverts the business model. An agent that teaches you to not need it churns its own customers. Every incentive points the other direction. It's also harder. Automating a task is engineering. Teaching someone to think differently about their behaviour is coaching, psychology, and product design rolled into one.
But the pressure will come. GPS made everyone capable of getting anywhere. It also destroyed the spatial reasoning of an entire generation. The people who still know how to read a map are more robust. They function when the signal drops.
The best agent doesn't compete on how much it does for you. It competes on how much better it makes you.
That sounds like a terrible business! It might also be the only one that matters.
A practical note: at ChatBotKit we believe the next generation of AI agents should leave users more capable, not more dependent. That's why we're building tools that surface patterns, teach skills, and help people outgrow the scaffolding. The goal isn't a better crutch. It's a better human.