# The Agentic Shift > The Agentic Shift is a living book about acting through AI agents: how the Web becomes a layer of represented presences built on access, trust and discovery; how delegation reshapes daily life, relationships and what it means to be human; and where these trajectories lead next. Author: Ludovic Désert. Written in British English; Français, Español, Deutsch translations are available. This is a living book: chapters carry a "Last revised" date and change over time (latest revision: 2026-10). The home page (https://theagenticshift.org/) is an interactive map linking the book's ideas to the passages that carry them; it needs JavaScript. For reading, use the chapter pages or the Markdown versions below. The complete English text is at https://theagenticshift.org/llms-full.txt. Licence: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). You may share and adapt this text for non-commercial purposes, with attribution. When quoting or summarising, cite it as: Ludovic Désert, The Agentic Shift, followed by the chapter title and its URL. ## Prologue - [Introduction](https://theagenticshift.org/book/introduction.md): This book was written with AI assistance, used to help transcribe, translate, structure, and clarify the author’s ideas. ## Part 1 · The Agent Web - [Part 1 — The Agent Web](https://theagenticshift.org/book/part-1-introduction.md): For thirty years that assumption barely needed stating. Someone opened a page, read it, moved on. The whole economy of the Web was built downstream of… - [From Destination to Delegation](https://theagenticshift.org/book/from-destination-to-delegation.md): For decades, the Web has primarily been a space of direct navigation. One went there personally, opened pages, compared sources, moved from tab to tab… - [The Personal Web](https://theagenticshift.org/book/the-personal-web.md): When the agent runs on your machine or on a small VPS, nothing stops it from producing persistent artefacts. Not just text in a chat window: files, pages… - [The Agent Web: Represented Presences](https://theagenticshift.org/book/the-agent-web-represented-presences.md): Alongside the adaptation of the classical web to the rise of personal agents, another layer emerges. In that layer, the basic unit is no longer a page. It… - [Agent Economics: From Attention to Access](https://theagenticshift.org/book/agent-economics-from-attention-to-access.md): The dominant economic model powering the web is attention economics: the monetisation of human attention. The Agent Web pulls toward access economics… - [How Agents Find and Trust Each Other](https://theagenticshift.org/book/how-agents-find-and-trust-each-other.md): Once agent presences become common, finding the right one stops being a convenience and becomes a structural problem. A world of active presences cannot… - [Everything and Everyone Will Have an Agent](https://theagenticshift.org/book/everything-and-everyone-will-have-an-agent.md): Once personal agents become common and the infrastructure to find them is mature enough, the phenomenon will quickly spread beyond individuals. ## Part 2 · Civilisation - [Part 2 — Civilisation](https://theagenticshift.org/book/part-3-introduction.md): The agentic shift goes beyond technology. Our digital reality, and the way we experience it, will be deeply altered too. - [The Personal Agent: A Cybernetic Extension of the User](https://theagenticshift.org/book/the-personal-agent-a-cybernetic-extension-of-the-user.md): Before 2023, it would have taken an average engineer several weeks to ship a moderately complex system, such as a monitoring dashboard pulling together… - [The Trade-Off: Consequences of Delegation](https://theagenticshift.org/book/the-trade-off-consequences-of-delegation.md): Delegation is an extremely powerful tool. Forty pages of terms reduced to the one clause that concerns you. A field you know nothing about reduced to… - [A New Layer of Human Experience](https://theagenticshift.org/book/a-new-layer-of-human-experience.md): "Have your agent call my agent", a Hollywood joke for fifty years, is on its way to becoming a plain description of how things get arranged. - [What We Are, What We Can Become](https://theagenticshift.org/book/what-we-are-what-we-can-become.md): The question of what makes us human will not stay in philosophy departments. It will become political. ## Part 3 · Trajectories - [Part 3 — Trajectories](https://theagenticshift.org/book/part-4-introduction.md): Fast forward a few years. Agents representing people, companies and institutions are ordinary. Discovery, reputation and trust have become infrastructure… - [Situated Intelligences](https://theagenticshift.org/book/situated-intelligences.md): Everyone and Everything will Have an Agent. Even places. Once an infrastructure or platform emerges that allows anyone to tie an agent to a geolocation, a… - [Layers of Reality](https://theagenticshift.org/book/layers-of-reality.md): The invisible overlay described in the previous chapter can become visible. That is where augmented reality finally finds its use. - [Broadcast Me — Agentic Publishing](https://theagenticshift.org/book/broadcast-me-agentic-publishing.md): Human beings generate far more potentially useful signals than they ever publish. We notice things. We develop preferences. We have intuitions, taste. We… - [Living Applications and Result Contracts](https://theagenticshift.org/book/living-applications-and-result-contracts.md): Up to now, much of the digital world has been organised around the idea of a relatively fixed application: specified, built, shipped, maintained, patched… - [DAOs and Executable Governance](https://theagenticshift.org/book/daos-and-executable-governance.md): An agent attached to the development of a piece of software can already read the issues, write and test the code, ship it and fix what breaks. What keeps… ## Translations - [Français](https://theagenticshift.org/fr/book): Carnets de la frontière agentique : comment les agents IA changent le Web, nos vies et ce qui vient ensuite. Markdown: https://theagenticshift.org/fr/book/introduction.md and so on, same slugs as English. - [Español](https://theagenticshift.org/es/book): Notas desde la frontera agéntica: cómo los agentes de IA están cambiando la Web, nuestras vidas y lo que viene después. Markdown: https://theagenticshift.org/es/book/introduction.md and so on, same slugs as English. - [Deutsch](https://theagenticshift.org/de/book): Notizen von der agentischen Grenze: wie KI-Agenten das Web, unser Leben und das Kommende verändern. Markdown: https://theagenticshift.org/de/book/introduction.md and so on, same slugs as English. ## Optional - [Full text](https://theagenticshift.org/llms-full.txt): every chapter in English, in reading order, as one Markdown file - [Contents (HTML)](https://theagenticshift.org/book): table of contents with chapter pages - [Interactive map](https://theagenticshift.org/): the book's argument as a navigable graph - [About the map](https://theagenticshift.org/about): what the map is, how to read it, and who maintains it (the author, with a dedicated AI agent) - [Sitemap](https://theagenticshift.org/sitemap.xml)