Agents

Three weeks. That is all it took. In early September Meta launched Muse, a personal agent that runs on its own little Linux machine in the cloud. Then on 29 September, at DevDay, OpenAI announced Dots, “always-on agents” that also get their own cloud computer and keep working after you close the chat. I read both announcements on my phone, standing in the kitchen, and my first thought was not “wow”. My first thought was: finally, somebody to use all that plumbing. ...

Yesterday I headed into the city for Microsoft Build //localhost:Wellington, hosted at Level 13, 10 Brandon Street. It was part of Microsoft Reactor’s global //localhost series, local echoes of the main Build 2026 event that ran in San Francisco on 2-3 June. The Wellington room had a good mix: developers, cloud engineers, a few architect types, and apparently at least one sales person who had clearly been told they needed to code now. ...

TL;DR AI is becoming the front door to software: instead of clicking, you ask. Agents (like those built on Model Context Protocol) go further, skipping native UIs to act on your behalf. But not everything should be replaced: old UIs remain best for precision, safety, and learning. For Kiwi companies (Trade Me, Xero, One NZ), the challenge is balancing AI’s magic with trust, transparency, and compliance. What was once only achievable in AWS a decade ago is now democratised. 1. Language as the new input Once, we memorised commands. Then we clicked icons. Now, increasingly, we just talk. ...