The Death of the Browser - From Open Highway to AI Agents

Keynote presentation at All Things Open AI 2025 that explores how internet browsers may become obsolete within a decade. Trace the evolution of the internet from an open highway to a maze of walled gardens and monetized APIs, examining how these challenges have created the foundation for AI agents to emerge as alternatives. Learn how technologies from the web scraping community are combining with large language models to create practical alternatives to costly API integrations. Follow a timeline-based exploration from the invention of browsers through the data scraping arms race to the dawn of AI agents that may enable a return to free information with "the web as the API." Slides from this 15-minute lightning talk by Rachel-Lee Nabors of AgentQL are available on SlideShare.