For a long time, the most boring digital business was the website business.
A restaurant needed a website. A dentist needed a website. A small law firm, a construction company, a local shop, a craftsman - they all needed some kind of online presence. Usually nothing revolutionary. A few pages, some pictures, a contact form, opening hours, Google Maps, maybe a bit of SEO.
The interesting part is that the technical barrier was never extremely high. WordPress existed. Templates existed. Later came Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, Shopify and countless other tools. In theory, many small businesses could have built these websites themselves.
But most of them did not.
Not because it was impossible, but because it was annoying. They had their actual business to run. They did not want to compare templates, write copy, configure plugins, connect domains, optimize images, fix mobile layouts and think about search engines. So they hired someone.
That is why the website agency became such a stable service business. The customer was not really buying code. He was buying someone who could turn a confusing digital task into something finished, usable and professional.
I think the same thing will happen again with AI agents.
The next version of the small website agency will not only build pages. It will build small digital workers.
A phone agent that answers missed calls. An email agent that sorts incoming requests. A scheduling agent that checks the calendar and suggests appointments. A simple back-office agent that reads documents, prepares drafts or moves information from one system into another.
At first, this sounds much more advanced than building a website. But structurally, it is a very similar business.
The small business owner still does not care about the technology itself. He does not care about model providers, vector databases, tool calling, orchestration, context windows or open-source licenses. He cares whether the thing solves a real problem without creating five new ones.
That is the whole product.
This is also why I do not believe this market will only belong to big software companies. Small businesses are too specific for that. Their processes are messy. Their tools are old. Their workflows are half-documented. Many things happen because "we have always done it this way". Generic software can help, but it often does not fit perfectly.
That was already true with websites. A bakery did not need a revolutionary web platform. It needed someone who understood what had to be shown, how the business should look, where the contact button belongs and what customers actually search for.
AI agents will need the same kind of translation work.
Someone has to understand the business process. Someone has to decide what the agent should do and, more importantly, what it should not do. Someone has to connect it to the calendar, the inbox, the CRM, the phone system or the internal software. Someone has to test edge cases, write instructions, monitor mistakes and adjust the system when reality changes.
That is service work.
And service work is exactly where small agencies and freelancers have always lived.
The technical barrier will keep falling. Today, building a useful AI agent still requires some knowledge. Tomorrow, many parts will be packaged into tools, templates and frameworks. This does not destroy the opportunity. It creates it.
WordPress did not kill the website business. It made the website business bigger.
The same could happen with AI agents.
When the tools become simple enough, more people can sell the service. When the models become cheap enough, more use cases make economic sense. Especially if open or local models continue to improve, many small automations that are too expensive today may become normal tomorrow.
This is where Europe could easily fall behind. If every AI workflow depends on expensive external APIs, many local use cases remain unattractive. But if powerful models become cheap and widely available, AI can move into the boring parts of everyday business: calls, emails, documents, appointments, follow-ups, forms, internal admin.
That is not the glamorous AGI story.
But it is probably the more realistic one.
The old website agency helped small businesses become visible online.
The new AI agency will help them operate with more capacity than they actually have.
And for many small businesses, that is much more valuable than another beautiful landing page.