Casado: AI agents select software based on core performance, not interfaces
Martin Casado · Box CEO on the AI Adoption Gap | The a16z Show · Apr 8, 2026 · at 34:02
Martin Casado is a General Partner at a16z. He counters the common view that software developers must market to AI agent interfaces, arguing agents evaluate backend software purely on technical semantics.
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“And at the end of the day, like, it's the semantics that end up mattering a lot more, right? And so, like, the agents, in my recollection, or in my experience, are very, very good at picking the right Back end for whatever they're doing. So they don't, they're not like, oh, like the interface for this is very good. The document is none of that. They're like the cost parameters of this, the durability of that... Really, I think that we're going to be pushed to actually build better systems. And that's what's going to be chosen.”
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