Established products have a problem. They assume they’re the center of someone’s universe, and everything should feed through them.

I’m going to call this a product-centric view. The product is at the center, everything else orbits it.

Some classic traits of product-centric thinking:

• Expecting people to come to you to get work done.
• Building integrations so other products plug directly into you.
• Asking people for context and preferences they’ve already shared somewhere else.
• Trying to own AI access by building your own agent inside the product.

I think this product-centric view has an expiry date. Once someone’s agent can work across all their tools, visiting each product one at a time starts to feel like friction. Coding and personal agents are bringing that date a lot closer.

A person-centric view

The products that thrive will take a different view. I’ll call this a person-centric view. It puts the person, along with their agent of choice, at the center.

The agent pulls in the data, UI, and context from each product when it’s needed. Over time the agent builds up memory and preferences from across all of them, so the person never has to start from scratch.

Let’s flip the traits from earlier to person-centric thinking. It means changing the defaults:

• They don’t expect a visit, they’re available wherever the person’s agent is working.
• They don’t build one-off integrations, they open up their capabilities to any agent.
• They don’t ask for context, they use what the person’s agent already knows.
• They don’t build their own isolated agent, they connect to one.

More than just a tool

There’s one obvious worry: going person-centric turns your product into a commodity, a bag of tools at the beck and call of an agent.

It doesn’t have to be like that. Think of the agent’s conversation as a new canvas. Your product still brings things an agent can’t do on its own.

• Your UI as interactive components. Previews, editor views, customization, questions. They can show up inside the agent’s conversation right when they’re needed.
• Your expertise. Skills that teach the agent to do the job the way your product would.
• Your moat. Data, content, or network. The agent can’t get it anywhere else, so it has to come to you.
• Your follow-through. The agent can draft the work, but you host it, ship it, take the payment, and support it when something breaks.

That’s your product showing up in a person-centric way.

Two fair pushbacks

What about the financial cost of AI? The best models are still expensive, and that limits who can use them. Here’s why I think this is a short-term concern and product leaders should look beyond it.

Open source models are crossing the usefulness threshold. They may trail the best models for a while, but smaller versions will soon be good enough to run capable agents on a laptop, almost for free. Free personal agents like Meta’s Muse could bring the financial cost to zero. Though paying with your data is a cost of its own. Either way, I think the cost wall will diminish.

There’s also a discoverability gap. My recent work on the WordPress benchmark shows agents know WordPress well but rarely choose it. Being known isn’t the same as being chosen. I don’t have a full answer yet, but I’d bet on the products that show up in a person-centric way.

A parting thought

The person is at the center of their own universe. The products that last will be the ones that show up well in it.