AI 2026: How agents are transforming software from passive tools to digital employees

The vision of a16z for the coming year is not just a forecast but a map of the future already underway. The American venture capital fund has outlined three radical transformations that will reshape the entire tech ecosystem: user interfaces will disappear, design will shift toward agents rather than users, and artificial voice will move from experimentation to mass market.

The End of the Prompt Era: When Users No Longer Need to Type

Marc Andrusko, an investor in AI applications, confidently states: by 2026, the input box will vanish as the main interface. This is not rhetorical exaggeration but the natural evolution of intelligent software.

Today, users are forced to formulate complex prompts, specifying what they want the AI to do. Tomorrow, the opposite will happen: the agent will observe your behavior, anticipate your needs, prepare action plans, and only ask for your final approval.

The pyramid of traditional corporate roles perfectly illustrates this dynamic. A low-proactivity employee identifies a problem and asks for help. A “S-level”—the highest proactivity—diagnoses autonomously, proposes solutions, implements them, and presents the results for confirmation. This will be the behavior of AI agents in future software.

But there is an even more important number behind this vision: the target market is expanding by 30 times. In the past, enterprise software was worth 300-400 billion dollars annually worldwide. Now, a16z targets the $13 trillion spent on human resources just in the United States. If AI agents can perform the work of real people—with reliability comparable or superior—the business case becomes irresistible.

Think of the future CRM: the agent doesn’t wait for the sales rep to open the program and choose an action. It autonomously studies open opportunities, scans emails from the past two years to identify abandoned leads, proposes optimal contact times, and drafts personalized messages. The human intervenes only to click “approval.”

Machine Legibility: Design is No Longer for Human Eyes

Stephanie Zhang introduced a destabilizing concept: software is ceasing to be designed for people and is starting to be optimized for machines.

For decades, designers and marketers followed simple rules: start articles with the 5W and 1H (who, when, where, what, why, how), place keywords in titles, make everything visually appealing. Why? Because human attention is limited and selective.

But agents don’t. An agent reads the entire text of an article simultaneously. It doesn’t skip the second paragraph. It isn’t distracted by background color. For agents, visual optimization is irrelevant; what matters is machine readability.

This radically changes content creation. If agents don’t seek visual appeal but extract pure meaning from text, content production costs plummet. An opposite phenomenon to traditional search may emerge: instead of long, insightful articles, brands and platforms will start generating huge quantities of ultra-specialized micro-content, optimized for what agents prefer to read. It’s the “keyword stuffing of the agent era.”

Stephanie observed a change already underway: SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) teams no longer open telemetry dashboards to understand what went wrong. AI analyzes data and sends concise reports directly to Slack. Sales teams no longer navigate the CRM; agents extract and process data for them.

Voice AI: From Lab to Large-Scale Operations

Olivia Moore reported an even more concrete change: voice agents are no longer science fiction; they are already in production. By 2025, dozens of real companies will have purchased and deployed them operationally. 2026 will be the year of explosion.

Healthcare is the flagship sector. Voice agents handle calls with insurance companies, pharmacies, service providers, and—surprisingly—patients. They schedule visits, send reminders, manage post-surgical follow-ups, support initial psychiatric consultations. The main driver? Endemic turnover in healthcare makes voice agents an economically indispensable solution.

Even more interesting is the banking and financial sector. It might seem an area where regulation would stifle automation. Instead, the opposite happens: voice AI surpasses humans in compliance. Humans find shortcuts, negotiate rules, interpret guidelines. Voice agents do not: they execute protocols with 100% accuracy. And, crucially, every interaction remains traceable and verifiable.

In recruiting, voice AI allows candidates to conduct initial interviews at any convenient time, then integrates promising candidates into the human process.

With improved foundational models in 2025, accuracy and latency have reached astonishing levels. Some voice AI companies need to deliberately slow down agents or add background noise to make them seem more “human” to listeners.

The Domino Effect on Call Centers and BPO

Olivia’s phrase summarizes the disruption: “AI won’t take your job, but a person using AI will”.

Traditional call centers and BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) companies will face a transition. In the short term, many clients will still prefer to buy managed services rather than implement technology themselves. But they will choose providers offering lower prices or handling higher volumes thanks to voice AI integration.

In some regions, the cost per human employee is still lower than the best available voice AI today. But as models improve and costs decrease, this advantage will vanish. Markets where manual labor is more expensive will be affected first.

One last note: voice AI excels in multilingual conversations and with strong accents. Many ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) providers have achieved a level of accuracy surpassing human comprehension in noisy or linguistically variable situations.

The Future Beyond B2B: Government, Healthcare, Well-being

Olivia highlighted unexplored government use cases: if a voice agent manages non-emergency calls to 911, it could also handle long and frustrating DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) lines and other public services. It’s a massive opportunity to improve service at reduced costs.

In consumer applications, companion voice agents are emerging in care facilities and nursing homes, functioning both as companions for residents and as passive monitors of health indicators over time.

The Opportunity Pyramid: From Technology to Industry

A final fundamental observation: voice AI is not a single market; it’s an entire industry. There will be winners at every level of the tech stack—from foundational models to platforms, from vertical integrations to professional services.

If a16z’s vision is correct, the next 12 months will mark the moment when software shifts from “command-response tool” to “digital employee that anticipates needs.” No more input interfaces, but continuous execution flows. No more design for human eyes, but optimization for automatic reading. No more voice AI as a technological curiosity, but as critical infrastructure in healthcare, finance, and public administration.

The pyramid of traditional corporate roles—from the basic reactive employee level to the “S-level” of maximum proactivity—is about to become the blueprint for the intelligent systems of the next decade.