Developers, Your Next Customer Is an AI Agent

Tomorrow, developers and founders will gather at The Pearl in San Francisco for Run by Apify, a one-day conference about building with AI agents. Among the speakers giving an opening lecture is Apify CEO Jan Čurn, who has been thinking about how to make tools those agents will actually use.

Last week I had the chance to sit down with him and talk about AI agents. The conversation showed me how solving one problem in the AI space often creates another, more complex but just as interesting. Software, for example, is easier to build than ever, yet finding the right tool is harder because there are so many to choose from.

Apify knows this tension well: the company started out in 2016 offering web tools for all sorts of jobs, such as web scrapers and other automations. Since then, it has watched software development change, from tools like Zapier to AI agents. It’s those AI agents that are some of Apify’s customers today, Jan explained:

People are no longer selecting the tools themselves, but they have their agents do it on their behalf. The agents are basically like a surogate of the customer.

Here’s the uncomfortable part: if your number one customer is an AI agent, your beautiful UI might not exactly be what’s needed. Agents read your API and your docs, and they look for tools in specific places. Jan says people have stopped clicking around interfaces too and rather hand the job to an agent.

“If there are 50 tools, or maybe 500, or 5,000, which one are you going to pick?”

Jan and I talked about how cheap software has become to build. Good software still costs money, but the cost of creating it has dropped across every part of development. When building something is almost free, we end up with so many tools and products that finding the right one is like walking through fog.

With so much choice, it’s hard to figure out which is good, so we end up doing the same thing, and using the same tools.

Jan said that a good example of this is the Apple App Store, where the number of new apps is growing very fast, but the usage is the same: the supply is massive, but the demand is pretty much the same as it ever was. For those building software, getting seen was never exactly an easy thing to do, but now it has become exponentially harder:

If there are 50 tools, or maybe 500, or 5,000, which one are you going to pick? Who can you trust? Trust is becoming really important.

Apify aims to solve this challenge through their marketplace, where they host thousands of “Actors”, or tools for different tasks their clients and other customers require help with. These tools are created by the community, and Apify pays their creators:

If those Actors are used by our users and customers, we pay 80% of the revenue to the creators. These creators are making about $2m per month. I think this month will go over $2m, and this is growing maybe four to five times year over year.

Jan added that having this type of spotlight could be a beneficial thing for developers, noting that someone could earn several thousand dollars per month by having their tool on the platform.

You don’t need to be a traditional developer to build for this marketplace

The marketplace’s growth is organic in a sense that more users can attract more creators, who will create more tools and Actors for more use cases, and that again attracts more users. Since Actors can be created relatively easily, Jan says that the barrier of entry is also reasonable, but there’s plenty of plans for the future:

Actors are self-contained, well-defined tools that do one job. In a way, these are tools that are pretty good to be completely generated by AI. So over time, we want to bring capabilities that make it easy for creators to create self-healing Actors that will automatically repair themselves. Our goal is for anyone who’s entrepreneurial to be able to do it, not just traditional software developers.

Right now, Apify is also working on expanding what Actors can do. In the past, Jan explained, Actors were batch-job oriented, meaning that one Actor would do its task with some inputs and return a result. Now, a lot of customers are looking for use cases similar to APIs, which means quick request and quick response. Apify is thus working on Server Actors, which will bring more features to Apify:

Server Actors will allow us and our creators to bring many new kinds of services to Apify, including APIs to serve data or perform transformations. We also have MCP connectors, so a user can connect external systems like Notion or Slack, and Actors can get access to them. We’re moving away from web data extraction into data as a service, general automation, and agentic tools.

The future looks bright but challenging, and not just for Apify. The same goes for any company building tools for people and AI agents. For developers, getting a tool to work is the easy part. To get an agent to use it, you also need clear documentation and a good API, so the agent can understand what the tool does and call it without trouble.

Still, building for agents instead of people is something the whole industry is trying to figure out. AI is built on predictions and training, yet it still seems to have a mind of its own. Whether that mind picks your tool out of thousands of others is an open question.