Don’t Let Agentic AI Become the Next Streaming War

Agentic AI is quickly becoming part of our daily interactions. As the AI trend continues, it is likely that intelligent assistants will soon manage everything from our schedules to our creative projects, each learning about our preferences, tone, and goals to make life more personalized and efficient. 

However, we see a familiar pattern already forming. Every company wants to own the relationship. Every platform wants its own agent. If we’re not careful, that competition could lead us straight into the same cycle we’ve been in so many times before. For example, the same cycle that broke the promise of streaming media. Think about it: no one is happy with the current fragmentation and diminishing value of multiple streaming service subscriptions just to watch a few of your favorite shows. 

We don’t want a thousand “mini agents” all trying to learn who we are. We want one (or a few) that actually know us, that can carry context no matter what platform we’re using. A new, partially educated assistant in every app would be the worst AI could offer: repetitive, inconsistent, and blind to the bigger picture of who we are and what we’re doing. 

Unfortunately, the competitive nature of today’s digital economy makes that future all too possible. Platforms still treat user context as proprietary instead of seeing its shared potential. The result? Every experience starts from zero, and the value of intelligence gets trapped inside individual systems.

There’s another path.

We could build a truly user-centric model, one where personal data, preferences, and learned context are kept secure within each platform but can safely connect across them. It’s an approach that prioritizes continuity and collaboration over isolation. 

That’s the kind of future MediaViz is helping enable for visual intelligence. Our technology already allows AI systems to “see” media the same way humans do with consistent labeling,  evaluation, and insight across environments. Imagine that kind of shared visual understanding extended to agentic systems everywhere, giving them the ability to maintain continuity and context across the digital world.

Agentic AI doesn’t have to repeat the same mistakes we’ve made so many times in this late stage capitalism climate. But it will unless we design it otherwise.