Where is the business value in agentic technologies? A lot of people are rightly asking this question, as we continue our journey into the agentic web.
This was a big reason why I chose to profile a mainstream web company’s adoption of AI in my first interview post on Agentic Web News, my new tech blog covering this era.
RunSignup is a web platform for race organizers and it is deploying AI chatbots and building agentic infrastructure across its product. But let me be very clear: it’s NOT an AI company. It has tens of thousands of customers and most of them aren’t tech-focused — these people just want a way to organize races online and get runners registered to their events.
What most impressed me about RunSignup’s rollout of AI is that although it’s cutting edge technology, it’s been very carefully — and safely — integrated into the company’s core product.
2 key lessons for integrating agentic AI
If I had to sum up the two key learnings from my interview with founder and CEO Bob Bickel, it’s these:
- Embed AI where users already work.
Don’t just bolt on novelty chatbots! They need to be integrated into existing workflows. This is especially true if you’re a SaaS platform, like RunSignup. But really, I think this applies to all organizations looking to add AI.
As Bob explained to me, one of the new agents they’re introducing will be integrated into a race director’s dashboard:
“So if you’re a race director, you have a dashboard control and set all your different options, and it has like a hundred menu items in it. What you’ll start to see is that some of these dashboard pages will now have this AI agent — either a little text box that you can chat in, or a circular chat widget that you can click on to perform the task.”
In RunSignup, these agents will augment the workflow that a user (a race director, in this case) is already doing.
- Move fast, but safely.
In other words, adopt the latest agentic technologies where they make sense to your core product, but do it with safeguards — and don’t rush it out the door. The RunSignup team has a special catchphrase for this: “aggressive patience.”
Bob noted that his team has implemented some 40 MCP tools for internal use, but they haven’t yet rolled these out to the public platform — they’re worried about the safety concerns with vibe coders, for instance. Eventually they will release these tools, because they’re proving to be of great value to Bob’s team. But with AI technology, you really do have to be careful.
I love this approach, because if there’s one thing we all learned from Web 2.0, it’s that “move fast and break things” (the Facebook philosophy) backfired for many companies in that era — including Facebook on several occasions.
“Everywhere in our product, in every screen, there will be an AI agent there.”
– Bob Bickel, RunSignup CEO
Safety is definitely key for AI adoption, but you don’t want to get left behind either. If AI can meaningfully improve your product for your customers, by all means be ambitious! Bob told me about the new AI infrastructure platform his team is building in order to add agentic functionality to RunSignup. “Everywhere in our product, in every screen, there will be an AI agent there,” he said.
So they’re putting resources into building agentic functionality, and will roll it out only when they’re satisfied it is safe to do so. That’s the right approach for basically any company adopting AI.
The trust problem around agentic AI
As part of my field notes this week, I’ve seen some backlash about the agentic functionality Google announced at its I/O conference — apparently some Google search users are jumping ship to DuckDuckGo.
I’ve also noticed the unfortunate tendancy for tech companies to lay off chunks of their workforce and blame it on the need to be “AI-native” going forward. One company even invoked the “agentic web” term in a headline announcing layoffs, which did no favours to my own humble branding efforts.
To put this in the context of this post, I have to admit that bringing AI into companies does have negative consequences as well as positive ones. I’m especially uncomfortable with all the layoffs happening in our industry, which have profound personal and societal impacts (I myself was laid off a few months ago, and do not currently have a regular income). How AI is impacting the job prospects of the younger generation coming into the workforce — my own daughter is in this age group — is something I worry about.
I think this is another reason to heed the lessons of RunSignup: move fast, but safely…and with empathy. Not all your users will have positive views about AI at this time (and some may never have), because of the disruption it is causing to employment, the environment, and society in general.
Let’s be careful out there, as Sergeant Phil Esterhaus used to say in Hill Street Blues. I will try to heed this advice in my coverage of AI at Agentic Web News — do subscribe if you’d like to join me for the ride.