Thanks for reading Neil and for your comment. I agree. There is a real disconnect between the hype that’s being sold by the general “AI tool industry” and the reality on the ground. I understand they are doing this to raise capital, but I think it’s also having some disastrous real-world consequences because “AI is coming for our jobs” is being taken literally by some people in decision-making roles who aren’t bothering to do simple test runs of their own or even bothering to ask their staff what their experiences with these tools has been like.

They are firing their humans and then attempting to use AI to replace the function of those humans…and everyone is losing. The workers because they are out of a job, the end users/consumers because they are being fed slop by the AI, and even the companies themselves who are either getting bad PR from it or just a general consumer backlash.

We’ve seen this already in countless examples from content to SaaS. The bigger companies have simply taken the hits and re-hired some of their humans back but the whole thing has been a mess. AI tools have been great, but for the most part, they still need humans using them rather than replacing humans altogether.

It’ll be interesting to see if in the coming year or two that we see some kind of a re-calibration and a bit more honesty about the capabilities of these things across the board.

Thank you for the reply, Martin,

I’m sorry if I came off too negative. My main complaint was that it appeared that you were suggesting that the login issues were mainly the AI Agent’s fault, rather than fundamental hurdles of our current internet infrastructure; but you did try to explain that in the article.

I believe it’s a good thing that Convergence doesn’t yet try to store and use credentials using Agentic AI yet due to security and other issues. It looks like there are some cool new technologies which will help with this though, such as Verifiable Credentials (VCs); which could offer a more secure and flexible way for AI agents to handle authentication. Also, stuff like ephemeral authentication could help by creating short-lived, task-specific credentials.

Thanks again!

Thanks for your comment Jason. Yes, I stated in the article that this is by design and that ebay’s actions were normal security precautions.

“In Proxy’s defense, a lot of those login hurdles were simply a result of security processes that most websites have.”

Is there something you would have done differently to avoid the logging in issues? I’m asking because you wrote “The first issues with logging in is the fault of the user.” so I’m curious if you have a tactic that readers might benefit from. Thanks again.

AI Agents can do some amazing things, but it still requires the user and other applications it interfaces with to support them. It can be helpful for users to be able to automate processes, but many malicious bots automate harmful activity which websites still need to limit.