We are moving from a world of “Search” to a world of “Agents.” Here is why infrastructure is the only safe bet.
Deion Impallomeni
Jan 14, 2026
For the last 25 years, essentially almost my entire life (yeah, keep guessing) the internet was built for eyes. It was designed for humans to scroll, click, and judge. We built websites like digital shop windows, polishing the glass and arranging the croissants, simply hoping that someone, somewhere, would walk by and buy one.
That era is changing rapidly. We just haven’t admitted it yet.
We are witnessing the “Industrialization of AI.” This isn’t about cute chatbots writing poems. It is a fundamental shift in the mechanics of the digital economy. The customer journey, the “funnel” we all studied, and I do not want to exaggerate, is collapsing (for the anxiety driven readers; it is merely changing, so we must take note). Less and less individuals are typing keywords into Google and browsing five different websites. They are asking AI agents (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude) for the answer.
The zero-click reality and the nearing end of the human web
In this new world, your website is no longer a destination; it is a raw data source. My current observation? Most organizations are treating this shift like a cosmetic update. They are rushing to purchase “AI Wrappers”, thin applications on top of AI agents, or hiring agencies to “optimize” their SEO for chatbots.
This is a trap.
You cannot “optimize” for a black-box model using the old playbook. If your company’s knowledge is locked in unstructured formats i.e. PDFs, scattershot website copy, and loose files, you are feeding the AI garbage.
Why I am betting on plumbing
While the world is distracted by the “Magic” of the models, I am betting on the mechanics of the transfer. I am betting on the “Digital Plumbing.” The pipes that carry the water don’t care which faucet you buy. You can swap the faucet every six months, but you never rip the plumbing out of the walls. The fixtures are temporary; the infrastructure is permanent.
The AI models are commodities. The data is the asset. Whether the winner is OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, or a Chinese model (please, let it be a Swiss one) they all have the same hunger: they need structured, verified data to function.
You cannot own the Model, but you must own the “Truth”. Information Sovereignty isn’t just a political buzzword; it is a technical necessity. If you don’t control what structured data goes through these pipes that feed these AI agents, you are effectively letting a black box in California define how your reality gets perceived by the public.
- The interface is a commodity: We will switch between AI models the way we switch between health insurances (in Switzerland this takes place yearly) and might have additional insurance benefits from other providers.
- The source is the asset: The structured, verified data that feeds those models is the only thing you actually own.
The Battle for Information Sovereignty
The zero-click reality and the nearing end of the human web.
There is a geopolitical angle here, too. Europe missed the Cloud era. We let Amazon (AWS) and Microsoft (Azure) build the physical rails of the internet. We cannot afford to miss the Data Infrastructure era.
If we do not build the systems to control, structure, and govern our own data, we will be digitally colonized by Silicon Valley models. “Information Sovereignty” means ensuring that when an AI speaks about your organization (or your country), it speaks the truth, not a hallucination generated in a California server farm.
This is not about national pride; it is about commercial survival. In an agentic world, s:he who owns the ‘Source of Truth’ owns the customer. If European organizations continue to rely solely on the scraping mechanisms of US tech giants, we surrender our narrative. We become passive passengers in our own economy, hoping the algorithm is kind to us. Building sovereign infrastructure is the only way to invert this power dynamic, creating a layer where we define the facts, and the AI models are forced to respect them.