TL;DR
The short version
Agents only get useful once the world builds them an internet. Scaling laws are settled and still working — that's not the interesting debate. The missing pieces are agentic memory, identity, entitlements, and open protocols so an agent can take action across every website, API, and system.
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott frames the fix as plumbing, not smarter models: MCP is the agentic web's HTTP, NLWeb is its HTML. And the durable edge isn't owning the stack — it's understanding a problem better than anyone, plus permissionless access to reach it.
Built on "Microsoft's Vision for an Internet Made for Agents" — Kevin Scott (CTO, Microsoft) with Dan Shipper on Every's AI & I, recorded at Microsoft Build 2025. Read the standards enthusiasm knowing Microsoft champions the protocols it's pitching.
The bottleneck moved from models to plumbing
The interesting debate is no longer scaling laws — those are settled and still working. Model reasoning has run ahead of what shipped products actually do, a gap Scott calls a capability overhang. The industry's job is delivering the capability that already exists to users, not waiting for the next model.
What closes the gap is infrastructure: agentic memory, identity, entitlements, and a shared protocol layer so an agent can act across systems. "This agent acts on behalf of this person, entitled to these resources" is a plumbing problem, and Scott wants it solved in the open rather than baked proprietary into one vendor's agents.
MCP is HTTP, NLWeb is HTML
Simple, open, composable protocols are the whole game. If you have a website or an API, the task is plumbing it so agents can talk to it — every NLWeb endpoint is an MCP server by default. It's the protocol-level version of the "apps are dead, expose APIs" argument: build the surface an agent can reach without a screen.
The reason to standardize is organizational, not just technical. Invoking Conway's law, Scott wants every Microsoft-internal system to speak one protocol to every internal agent — so organizational seams don't leak into product complexity.
You don't want to be shipping your org chart when you are building your agents.
Kevin Scott, CTO, Microsoft
Permissionless, not verticalized
Verticalized-versus-open is a false dichotomy. Permissionless innovation removes low-value gatekeeping middle layers, and AI itself can supply robust security — so you don't have to trade one for the other. The corollary: there won't be one agent to rule them all. Diversity comes from product understanding of a specific problem, not differentiated infrastructure.
The best startups, in Scott's read, aren't trying to out-build the platform — they tune existing infrastructure to a problem they understand better than anyone. That's where the leverage sits when the plumbing is a commodity.
Synchronous to asynchronous is the next shift
Expect a move from "prompt and wait" to delegating long-running tasks that fan out across systems, iterate, and return later for your next decision. That's the infrastructure claim behind agent loops and overnight delegation — and it only works once the protocol layer lets an agent reach everything it needs while you're away.
Scott's framing for why a platform company builds the substrate before the demand is proven: "The cost of betting on failure versus betting on optimism is a real big difference."
