Josh Miller, CEO of The Browser Company, has sparked debate in Silicon Valley after publicly questioning why AI agents have not caught on with ordinary consumers, despite the tech industry's conviction that they represent the future of computing. His viral social media post argued that while the underlying technology is theoretically ready to transform work and daily life, the general public simply does not care, a view that resonated widely among industry insiders who have poured billions into developing agent products. This matters because it highlights a growing gap between Silicon Valley's enthusiasm and real-world adoption, raising questions about whether AI labs can ever capitalise on their massive investment in more capable models.

Figures cited include OpenAI's Codex and ChatGPT Work agents, which together have around 10 million weekly users, with Anthropic's Claude Code and Cowork reportedly seeing similar adoption, dwarfed by the roughly one billion monthly users each for chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini. Miller, whose previous startup Arc was acquired by Atlassian for $610 million, argues the problem is conceptual: "AI agents" are an industry-invented technical frame rather than an actual consumer product, and firms should instead build features that quietly use agent technology without labelling it as such. He points to his own company's success with a personalised morning briefing feature in its Dia browser, which uses an AI agent behind the scenes but is marketed simply as a useful daily tool rather than as "agentic" technology.