The Age of Participatory Software
How simulation, agents, and avatars are redefining our relationship with software
Today’s Features:
The General Intelligence Company: an agent-supported company-building platform.
Stemuli, Zero University: simulation-based learning products.
Exa: a search engine for agents.
Agetmail: email for agents.
Lemonslice, Atmee, Arcads, Icon: AI avatar companies.
For decades, software has been built around a simple assumption: humans do the work. The interface exists to help us navigate information, complete tasks, and make decisions. But now, a different pattern is emerging: software is no longer a tool, it's becoming an actor.
The products capturing our attention aren't merely helping us accomplish things. They're teaching us, motivating us, competing with us, and increasingly acting on our behalf.
Three trends I've been watching recently point toward this shift.
Simulation is the New Gamification
A decade ago, every product wanted to be "gamified." Points. Badges. Leaderboards. But most of these mechanics ultimately felt superficial because they were layered on top of existing workflows.
Today feels fundamentally different. Companies like The General Intelligence Company are turning company building itself into the game. Revenue becomes a score and milestones unlock new capabilities. Entrepreneurship starts to resemble an RPG (role-playing game). Meanwhile, platforms like Stemuli and Zero University are teaching AI literacy and workplace skills through simulated environments rather than lectures.
A useful distinction emerges. Gamification adds game mechanics to reality. Simulation transforms reality into the game. As AI lowers the cost of generating dynamic environments, feedback loops, and personalized challenges, simulation becomes a powerful way to teach behavior rather than simply transfer information.
The cultural question isn't whether this works. Rather it’s what happens when building a company and playing a game become psychologically indistinguishable?
Agents May Need Their Own Internet
For thirty years, we’ve gotten pretty good at building software for humans (think: interfaces, menus, dashboard, search boxes). But agents don’t need any of these things. An agent doesn't care about beautiful navigation. It doesn't need onboarding or a clean mobile app. It just needs infrastructure and data. The question this raises: do agents require an entirely separate software ecosystem? Maybe in the long run, but for now, there are a small set of primitives that appear ripe for exploration:
Discovery (search)
Identity and trust
Payments
Communication
Advertising and demand generation
Companies like Exa are already rethinking search around agent use cases rather than human browsing. AgentMail provides email inboxes for agents. You can imagine similar abstractions emerging elsewhere:
An Apple Pay for agents
Stripe for agent-to-agent commerce
Ad networks where agents are the customer acquisition channel
Reputation systems designed for agents
We may not need an entirely new software universe, but it may be cool to have a handful of foundational layers that allow agents to participate in the existing one.
The Avatar Economy
The first wave of AI gave software a brain. And for years, conversational AI largely lived as text. Then it gained a voice. Now it's gaining a face. And eventually it will gain a persistent identity. This is important because humans don't naturally form relationships with tools. We form relationships with characters, where trust, memory, and emotions live.
Companies like Lemonslice are building emotional intelligence infrastructure — something akin to ElevenLabs for faces — capable of reading and responding to emotional state in real time.
Others, like Atmee, are building avatar-driven experiences with celebrity partners including Floyd Mayweather and Blackpink.
Avatars are also likely to show in ads. Companies like Arcads and Icon help human creators and businesses affordably create avatar-based campaigns.
If agents become participants in our lives rather than utilities we occasionally invoke, they'll likely need identities that feel coherent across interactions. The avatar becomes the interface; not because faces are novel but because relationships scale better than commands.
Closing Thoughts
Viewed together, these trends point toward the same destination.
Simulation transforms software from a tool into a teacher.
Agents transform software from a tool into an actor.
Avatars transform software from a tool into a character.
For most of computing history, software was something we used. Increasingly, software is becoming something we interact with.
