--- title: "Vision" canonical: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/21/vision" publication: "TinyFish" publisher: "TinyFish" language: "en-US" guide: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/llms.txt" permalink: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/21/vision" issue: 21 section: "vision" description: "Where human-AI collaboration is heading" authors: ["Nora Kaplan","Rina Takahashi"] published: 2026-03-22 updated: 2026-03-19 articles: 11 --- # TinyFish > CURRENT is a journal about AI agents in production, for the engineering and product leaders who have to make them work. Drawing on experience building enterprise web agents, it explains why the demo succeeded and the deployment didn't, and what that means for choosing vendors, briefing the board, and avoiding mistakes others have already made. [Read on the website]() ## Issue 21 — Vision Where human-AI collaboration is heading ### The Persuasion Stack - [What Breaks When the Buyer Has No Brain to Hack]() — By [Nora Kaplan]() · Published 2026-03-19 · Format: The Persuasion Stack Ninety-seven percent of popular websites and apps deploy dark patterns—design choices engineered for a distractible, loss-averse, emotionally available human buyer. That might be the commercial web's actual load-bearing structure. Gartner predicts 90% of B2B purchasing will be agent-intermediated by 2028. Early research on how AI agents actually navigate e-commerce is surfacing results that nobody in the $258 billion digital advertising industry is going to love. The interesting part is what's left standing once the persuasion layer falls away. ### New Rules, New Gatekeepers - [When the Customer Has No Eyes]() — By [Rina Takahashi]() · Published 2026-03-19 · Format: New Rules, New Gatekeepers The commercial web was built to persuade people looking at screens. Landing pages, hero images, the choreography of conversion funnels. But a growing share of product discovery now runs through AI agents that don't scan or feel. They parse. Roughly 69% of websites have no structured data for them to parse at all. Being found was always the first problem of commerce. What happens when the thing doing the finding can't see you? - [Who Decides What an Agent Can Trust?]() — By [Rina Takahashi]() · Published 2026-03-19 · Format: New Rules, New Gatekeepers Visibility is the first problem. Trust is the harder one. Once an agent finds a vendor, it needs to decide whether to transact, and the signals humans rely on — brand recognition, a colleague's offhand recommendation, gut feel — don't compute. Someone has to build the infrastructure that tells agents what's trustworthy. History suggests whoever does gains power that outlasts any single transaction. That layer is being poured now, and concrete sets fast. ### The Obsolete Playbook - [A VP of Marketing Watches Her Craft Disappear Into the Void Where Page Two Used to Be]() — Published 2026-03-19 *Margot Vellum is not a real person, though she is, regrettably, a composite of several real conversations that all ended with someone staring into a glass of wine and saying some version of "I don't know what I'm for anymore." She is the VP of Marketing at a mid-size cybersecurity SaaS company, a former tech journalist who crossed into content marketing fifteen years ago and built a career on the conviction that good writing wins deals. We spoke over video. She had a mug that read "Content Is King" with "King" crossed out in Sharpie and replaced with nothing.* ### First Contact - [The First Legal Line Around Agent Commerce]() — Published 2026-03-19 Judge Chesney's March 10 injunction against Perplexity's Comet agent landed on a distinction that will define the next decade of commerce: user permission is not platform authorization. Your agent can act for you. The platform still gets a veto on whether it walks through the door. ### Further Reading - **AI Agents as Enablers of Personalized Law: Towards Agentic Disclosures?** — [Source]() — Published 2026-03-19 Oxford legal scholars ask what disclosure law even means when the "reader" is a procurement agent. - **Agentic Commerce Shifts B2B Marketplaces From Intermediaries to Infrastructure** — [Source]() — Published 2026-03-19 PYMNTS on why structured payment terms and clean data now win deals that relationships used to. - **How Brands Are Repositioning for Agentic Engine Optimization** — [Source]() — Published 2026-03-19 The WEF's primer on machine-readable brand narratives, and why search rankings are becoming a trailing indicator. - **How AI Agents Discover B2B Vendors** — [Source]() — Published 2026-03-19 Practical look at agent shortlisting mechanics in procurement. If you're not in the first pass, you're nowhere. - **The Robots.txt for AI Agents Is Coming: What the Open Banking Analogy Reveals** — [Source]() — Published 2026-03-19 A practitioner's case for structured agent access protocols, borrowing hard-won lessons from open banking. - **From Robots.txt to AI Regulation: Web Standards Evolving for Machine Consumers** — [Source]() — Published 2026-03-19 Useful synthesis of IETF, W3C, and EU efforts to rebuild web governance around non-human traffic patterns. ## Other sections in Issue 21 - [Daily Brief]() - [Market Pulse]() - [Foundations]() - [Practitioner's Corner]() - [Echoes]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()