Dev Day Didn't Kill AI Agent startups, but it did unveil a New Layer of Control

I've seen a lot of posts on social media declaring that "OpenAI just killed AI agent startups". I understand the reasoning, but I have to say that I disagree.

In my opinion, what Dev Day really revealed was the gravitational centre of the next era for AI. This new era will completely transform the intent → action layer. Once we move to a world where your workflows, memory, preferences, and reasoning live in that layer, going back to discrete apps will feel very archaic indeed.

A New Control Layer Between Thought & Action

OpenAI's recent moves are less about what they built, and more about making inevitable a universal layer that mediates human intent and digital systems. Imagine that you don't open apps anymore to carry out tasks. You express an intention, and an intelligence substrate (or fabric) routes, reasons, orchestrates, and coordinates. You pause a video inside ChatGPT and ask it to "explain that last line". Rather than jumping you out into a separate app to figure it out, it responds in context based on what it knows you already know, and in the style you are most comfortable with.

Once you experience that kind of fluidity, bouncing between fragmented apps will start to feel very siloed and manual. So the real gravitational centre for the next era of AI is owning that layer where meaning, memory, tools and decisions converge.

It's Structural, Not Just Feature Innovation

Going forwards the strategic leverage will belong to whoever owns that interface between human intention and system action. As you integrate more tools, services, and data flows in that intelligence fabric, that fabric essentially becomes your external mind. We'll have complete friction collapse. Users won't have to context-switch, reauthenticate, reorientate because the system will "just know" what they want and how they want it.

Put simply, the focus will no longer be on "features" or "UX", but depth of integration, memory coherence, context reliability, and seamless transitions.

But this is an ambitious goal. If this layer is opaque, coercive, or buggy, users will push back. This new control layer must feel enabling, not controlling.

The Axes of Change

So what are the different axes of change? Here are the arenas where the next battles will be fought....and won.

In this emerging world, apps become nodes on a substrate of intelligence; they aren’t islands you consciously switch between.

The Model Context Protocol

This shift isn't theoretical, and the plumbing has already been emerging for a little while now. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard to let AI clients and external systems exchange context, state, and tool signals in a unified way. Think of MCP as a communication layer that lets your system become an expert in someone's intelligence fabric. You don't just offer API endpoints, you offer context-aware services.

Because MCP is open, different agentic systems can interoperate using the same protocol, or the same language, rather than each going off and building something propriety.

That said, we're far from mastering this yet, and it's still early. Security, versioning, trust, malicious connectors, context drift, and may other factors are all being actively explored. But MCP is a sign of things to come in the very near future.

What I'm Watching and Where to Place Bets

I'm not a betting man, but if I were these are the areas I'd be focusing on the most:

• Memory scale, drift & coherence

  Storing everything is easy; making it useful is hard. Context rot, i.e. incoherent or diluted memory, is a real problem in this future world.

• Fragmented intelligence fabrics

  Multiple “control layers” will compete. Which ones become dominant? Which ones interoperate?

• User backlash, privacy & regulation

  Deep context = deep surveillance. Governance, consent, transparency will be key battlegrounds.

• Failure modes & emergent errors

  When the fabric misinterprets, chains wrongly, or cascades errors, the consequences are magnified. Testing, oversight, kill switches are vital.

• Security of connectors & protocols

  Tool poisoning, malicious connectors, prompt injection; these threats hit hardest at the layer linking context to action.

• Switching friction & vendor risk

  Even as layers grow, the ability to switch fabrics or modules must exist. Rigid lock-in is a vulnerability.

• Domain specialisation vs general intelligence

  In regulated or niche domains, domain logic + context will outpace pure general intelligence. The fabric must call into expert systems.

Conclusion

Dev Day didn’t kill agent startups, it just changed the focus. The real contest is no longer “who has the best agent.” It’s who controls the layer where intention meets execution. If you lose that layer, your module becomes a plugin in someone else’s intelligence fabric.

That said, there will continue to be a place for startups building those modules and agentic tools which plug into that control layer. It's just a question of the role you want to play. I think it's clear to see where OpenAI's focus is....