--- title: "Vision" canonical: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/24/vision" publication: "TinyFish" publisher: "TinyFish" language: "en-US" guide: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/llms.txt" permalink: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/24/vision" issue: 24 section: "vision" description: "Where human-AI collaboration is heading" authors: ["Nora Kaplan"] published: 2026-04-13 updated: 2026-04-09 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 24 — Vision Where human-AI collaboration is heading ### The Trajectory - [When the Thing That Disappears Is the Thing That Decides]() — By [Nora Kaplan]() · Published 2026-04-08 · Format: The Trajectory Right now, AI agents have names. They get launched at keynotes with brand identities, marketed as teammates you can @mention in a project tracker. Underneath the fanfare, interoperability protocols are moving into standards-body governance, on track to ship by year's end. The agents are being made ready to disappear. ### Two Tensions - [The 600 Agents Nobody Hired]() — By [Nora Kaplan]() · Published 2026-04-08 · Format: Two Tensions The most valuable AI agents in enterprise today are background processes running on event triggers across supply chains, compliance pipelines, and procurement systems, operating continuously without human prompts. A security vendor recently mentioned that a Fortune 500 client found hundreds of these agents running inside its environment that nobody knew existed. The audience didn't flinch. That indifference is the governance problem. - [How Do You Sell Something That Succeeds by Vanishing?]() — By [Nora Kaplan]() · Published 2026-04-08 · Format: Two Tensions The most valuable AI agents succeed by disappearing, which creates a governance problem explored in our companion piece. It also creates a commercial one. Atlassian's design docs for Rovo instruct teams to make AI visible so users trust it. The product aspiration is that nobody thinks about Rovo at all. Somewhere between those two instructions lives an unanswered question about how you price, brand, and renew software whose success metric is user indifference. ### Caught Between - [The Designer With Two Figma Files and No Good Answer]() — Published 2026-04-08 *Gil Fontenot is not a real person. He is, however, a composite of every enterprise product designer who has ever been told to "make it pop" in a demo and "make it disappear" in production, in the same product review meeting. We spoke over video. He had opinions.* ### The Timeline - [The Shrinking Arc: How Fast Technologies Become Infrastructure]() — Published 2026-04-08 Electricity took roughly 40 years to go from novelty to something city dwellers forgot they lived without. The web compressed that to about 20. Mobile did it in eight. ### Further Reading - **The Computer for the 21st Century** — [Source]() — Published 2026-04-08 Mark Weiser's 1991 paper argued that the most profound technologies are the ones that disappear. Thirty-five years later, agent infrastructure is finally testing whether he was right. - **The Ambient Revolution: Why Calm Technology Matters More in the Age of AI** — [Source]() — Published 2026-04-08 Picks up Weiser's thread and pulls it into the current AI moment, making a sharp case that good infrastructure behaves like a roommate, not a houseguest demanding constant attention. - **Enabling Agent-First Process Redesign** — [Source]() — Published 2026-04-08 Branded content via Deloitte, but the "humans as governors, agents as operators" framing is useful. The real signal here is that process redesign around agents has become consultancy-grade advice, which tells you something about where the maturity curve sits. - **AI Agents as Colleagues: The Workplace Design Nobody's Planning For** — [Source]() — Published 2026-04-08 Fresh Gensler survey data on how AI power users actually work differently, plus Gartner projections on agent adoption. The Atlassian layoffs add uncomfortable context to the visibility question: agents are becoming colleagues faster than anyone is redesigning the workplace to accommodate them. - **Deciphering the Alphabet Soup of Agentic AI Protocols** — [Source]() — Published 2026-04-08 The most readable map of MCP, A2A, and the growing tangle of agent protocols. Protocol consolidation is how a technology announces it's becoming infrastructure, and this piece captures the moment mid-announcement. - **Enterprise Agentic AI Landscape 2026: Trust, Flexibility, and Vendor Lock-In** — [Source]() — Published 2026-04-08 Practitioner-level analysis of how vendor lock-in now compounds at every layer of the agent stack. Worth reading for the structural argument: the default choices being made today will quietly constrain what's possible for years. ## Other sections in Issue 24 - [Daily Brief]() - [Market Pulse]() - [Foundations]() - [Practitioner's Corner]() - [Echoes]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()