Agent Experience: Building an Open Web for the AI Era

**Matt Biilmann** (0:05)
One of the things I've started thinking a lot about is this concept of AX, or agent experience. I wrote an article about that and have centered a lot of Netlify's efforts around how do we build the best AX. And by AX, I mean, back in the 90s, Don Norman coined the term UX, user experience, the holistic experience of the user of your product, not just the user interface, but like how do they interact, right? And as I said, when Netlify started, we built our whole philosophy around the focus on DX.
What's the holistic developer experience around building with this architecture for the web? Now, we're starting to see agents play a major role in building the web, writing a lot of the code, coming up with the assets, doing all of that, collaborating with humans, but multiplying this factor of what you can build. So we're starting to think a lot about the agent experience of our platform and the agent experience of the web.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:00)
Hi, everyone, and thanks for listening to the A16z AI Podcast. As you might know, there is, if not a consensus, then at least a strong undercurrent of feeling that the web is not as exciting of a place as it once was. Blame might lie in any number of places, including walled gardens, cookie cutter designs, and a level of complexity that keeps newcomers from building interesting, modern sites. And while generative AI has proven incredibly exciting for many reasons, it has many of these web experience critics fearful that AI-generated dreck will soon overtake the web completely. However, as Netlify co-founder and CEO, Matt Biilmann explains in this discussion with a16z general partner Martin Casado, AI agents could actually have a profoundly beneficial impact on the future web. As Matt sees it, a new set of standards around what he calls agent experience could open up entirely new capabilities for websites and design and bring millions of new web developers online. This doesn't mean just more people building the same old sites faster with new tooling. Today, for example, Netlify says it's seeing 10,000 sites a day launched using AI-generated code, but rather they'll be incorporating entirely new elements around 3D assets, textures, personalized experiences, and other things we can't yet predict. You'll hear Matt and Martin dive deep into all of that, as well as, among other things, what new developer primitives might emerge after these disclosures.
As a reminder, please note that the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details, please see a16z.com/disclosures.

**Martin Casado** (2:40)
Matt, it's great to have you here. Thanks for coming and joining. Very excited to talk about AI when it comes to the web and what you're thinking about there. So maybe for some background, just give a quick overview of yourself, and then we'll jump into the company, and then what you're seeing.

**Matt Biilmann** (2:53)
Sounds great. I'm Matt Biilmann, CEO and co-founder of Netlify, and have been building tools for developers, and specifically for web developers for a couple of decades now. Netlify being the one I've worked on the longest, and that's today serving 6 million developers, reaching billions of people every month.

**Martin Casado** (3:11)
Yeah, probably worth going through, because at the time when Netlify came out, it was actually a pretty radical departure from how we'd done web development, and now it is the standard. So in many ways, you're this pioneer of the web. So maybe talk through what Netlify does, and what it introduced.

**Matt Biilmann** (3:27)
At its very core, Netlify helps developers go from code in their local code editor to something running on a URL on the web, in production, reaching as many users as you can possibly reach with minimal friction. The original disruption or invention around that was this insight that when I started Netlify, the way people would architect for the web would be large monolithic applications where the data access layer and the business logic and the backend logic and the frontend was all sort of part of one application bundled together.
And I started really building this belief that on the backend side of things, we would start splitting that monolith into different APIs and services where some are your own, running in your own data centers, and some are other people's services like Stripe or Contentful or Algolia or all these APIs. And then the role of the web developer would really change to actually build the actual web UI with web technologies and so on as its own self-standing application decoupled from all that backend infrastructure stuff. Saw these first sort of headless services pop up and could see that no one was really thinking about, okay, so what does that mean for the head? Like, how are we going to build the head to all of these? And that really became the start of Netlify, figuring out what's the right end-to-end platform to build the head for all of these web experiences. And back then, we kind of had to coin a term around it, Jamstack, just to start having even a nomenclature to talk about this is like a different way of architecting, right?