When agents start choosing your software

What we're tracking

• •Agents are starting to choose your software For most of the history of business software, a person decided which tool to buy and a person decided when to leave. That decision rested on things people notice: the interface, the price, the sales relationship. An AI agent notices none of those. It reaches a tool through the tool's API, and if the API will not let the agent do enough work quickly enough, the tool is unusable to the agent no matter how good it looks to a person.
• •When a vendor evaluates your product and then builds its own Build-versus-buy is an old decision, but it takes on a sharper edge when the thing being built is a piece of AI plumbing. Today a startup took a larger company to court over one. As reported, "Runlayer is suing Rippling after Rippling evaluated the startup's MCP gateway product and then opted to build one itself" [3]. Set aside who is right, which the courts will decide. The pattern underneath is worth understanding, because it can touch any small vendor and any buyer who relies on one.
• •AI arrives inside the document Two changes to Google Docs today point in the same direction: the AI work is moving into the surface where you already write, rather than sitting in a separate window. Google said "You can now create and edit images, diagrams, and infographics directly alongside your text using Gemini in Google Docs" [4], and separately that "We're introducing Gemini-powered comment workflows in Google Docs to help you quickly understand and respond to collaborator feedback" [5].
• •The supply chain you inherit with every install When you install a package or add a step to a build pipeline, you are trusting not only that code but everyone who is able to change it later. That is the software supply chain, and it is the part of your stack you did not write and almost never read. It became visible today because GitHub described its work on it: "Explore the changes we've shipped across npm and GitHub Actions over the past few months to disrupt supply chain attack techniques and limit their impact" [6].
• •Choosing an automation platform you will not outgrow Two comparison pieces published today are a useful reminder that automation is not one category. One opens by noting that "Some of the world's most critical infrastructure runs on technology that predates the internet"
• •The common thread Every item above describes the same movement from a slightly different angle. The agent that switched marketing platforms, the gateway that sits between agents and your tools, the assistant reading your documents, the code you inherited without writing it, and the platform you use to wire everything together are all parts of a stack that now runs partly on its own. Choosing well no longer means picking the tool with the best screen. It means checking the limits, the exits, and the layers you are agreeing to depend on — because those are the parts an agent runs into first, and they are the part