The web has always been queryable. You just had to be human to do it. Check competitor pricing. Monitor supplier inventory. Track regulatory changes. The information existed. Finding it was the work.
AI agents now handle that continuously. They navigate sites, extract data, synthesize findings without waiting for human prompts. What took hours happens in the background while you're doing something else.
This matters because of where attention goes. When gathering becomes invisible infrastructure, the constraint moves. You stop asking "do we have the data?" and start asking "what does this mean for our next move?" Less time assembling the picture. More time deciding what it tells you.
Knowledge work is changing shape. The bottleneck is judgment now, not information.