Agent-native
Also known as: agent-native design, agent-first
When a product is agent-native, the architecture assumes that some participants in a workflow are AI agents, not just humans using AI tools. That changes what the product has to do: it needs to assign agents persistent identities, manage what context each agent can access, handle asynchronous agent actions, and surface agent outputs alongside human activity without friction.
The distinction matters because most existing software was built for human users and then retrofitted with AI features. An agent-native product can do things a retrofit cannot, like letting an agent proactively surface a decision across two conversations it has been following, or giving a coding agent its own branch of a repository to work in without manual setup.
The term surfaced prominently in 2026 as a positioning shorthand for new tools (messaging apps, IDEs, cloud infrastructure) that treat agents as participants rather than plugins. You will hear it used to describe communication tools, developer environments, and workflow systems. The practical test: if you removed all the human users, would the product still function? An agent-native product usually would.