In his 1997 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos famously wrote that it was "Day 1 for the Internet."
The number behind that conviction was one he'd come across three years earlier in 1994, web usage had grown 2,300% in a single year.
At the start of 2025, agentic AI (these are bots acting on behalf of a person, not those scraping for training data) accounted for 1.7% of automated traffic. Over the course of the year, that category grew 7,851%.
Bezos rearranged his entire life around 2,300% because this kind of yearly growth is once in a generation.
Well, I am telling you that it is happening again.
Agentic web usage just grew at 7,851% in a single year.
I've become convinced that humans were the warmup act for the internet. It is almost like the core technology was never ment for us as the primary user.
Consider what we (the humans) actually bring to the internet as users.
On an absurdly generous accounting, a person has 24 hours a day, can look at one page at a time, and reads maybe 250 words a minute.
We need pages rendered in pretty colors.
We need the content chunked so our eyes can find it.
We get distracted.
We need sleep.
We are not good users of the internet. To be honest most of us aren't really users at all.
We are viewers.
The internet is a protocol for moving structured information between machines, and we spent thirty years building an elaborate translation layer on top of it so that our non-digital minds could participate.
We built HTML, LCD panels, headphones, keyboards, and invested trillion dollars of design work. All to convert machine-native information into something our primate brains can absorb through two eyes and two ears at 250 words a minute.
AI agents need none of this.
In fact, they work better without all the pretty colors and fancy landing pages.
We joking call Gen Z the children of the internet, but I believe that AI agents are the first true children of the internet.
They are the native speakers. They're the first users of the internet that don't require the internet to be disguised as something else first.
They are limited only by the CPU clock speed.
They can easily read in parallel.
They can multiply far faster than we can.
They do not sleep.
They do not blink.
They do not make buying decisions based of how attractive the model wearing the Patagonia jacket is.
I don't know where this is going, but I do know this.
Bezos didn't know what 2,300% would turn into. He just knew that a number like that doesn't show up twice in a career.
Well, it just showed up in mine.
7,851%