@tjrobertson52

Every business needs an AI agent. I think by 2027, having an AI agent for your business is going to be even more important than having a website for your business. A year ago, most business owners would have found that statement insane.

But a lot has happened in a year, including how we think of AI agents.

So I wanna talk about what an AI agent actually is in 2026, why? I think we can now make a confident guess about what AI agents will continue to look like in the future and why creating an AI agent for your business is actually very easy. A year ago, if someone said they created an AI agent, they probably either meant some kind of n8n.

Workflow or some custom coded scaffold that we would now refer to as a harness.

These were difficult to set up, and they worked all right, but they weren't great, and as of today, they're completely obsolete. So what happened? In short, I think clawed code and open claw happened.

Both of these products showed us how good a harness could be and also how general purpose they can be.

Shortly after Anthropic and Peter Steinberger realized this, OpenAI realized they're behind and made similar updates to Codex. These platforms or harnesses are so good and improving so rapidly that it just doesn't make sense to make your own. Whether it's Codex or Claude Code or Openclaw or Hermes or whatever new Better harness comes out next.

It's clear that we all want our agents running on one of these platforms.

And since these platforms tend to leap frog each other, we need the ability to switch our agent from one platform to another. When I talk about having an AI agent for your business, I'm not talking about the AI model. I'm not talking about the harness.

So what am I talking about?

What is an AI agent in 2026 and I think for the foreseeable future? An agent is just a folder. That's it.

It's just a folder full of markdown files.

That might sound weird, but consider that a website is also just a folder. A folder full of mostly HTML files. Now, unlike a website, we don't yet have an agreed upon standard for how we should arrange our agent files.

But if you haven't already, please watch my video on Google's Open Knowledge format that they just announced.

I'm optimistic that this will finally give us an agreed upon standard. But how can an AI agent be nothing more than an organized folder of markdown files? Well, it's because all the capabilities that an AI needs are already handled by the platforms like Codex or Claude.

All that AI needs to act as an agent for your business is knowledge and instruction.

If you give it enough knowledge and really good instructions, it's pretty amazing what it can already do for your business. In fact, at this Point. I believe anything that can be done on a computer for your business can be handled by a well structured agent, which, again, is just a folder of markdown files.

At our marketing agency, the first thing we do for every client is to build a folder like this.

In fact, at this point, we can't really do any work for a client until that folder is built, because all of our systems live on top of that. And if, as a business, you plan on keeping up with AI, in other words, if you don't plan on going out of business, then you also need to think about how you're gonna put together a folder like this for your business.