Descriptions:
Atai Barkai, co-founder of CopilotKit, presents the AG UI protocol—short for Agent User Interaction Protocol—and makes the case that all UI will eventually be mediated by AI agents. Delivered at AI Dev 26 in San Francisco, the talk covers CopilotKit’s production infrastructure, which currently powers tens of millions of weekly agent-to-user interactions for companies including Cisco, DocuSign, and Fortune 500 firms.
The core announcement is the AG UI protocol, born from CopilotKit’s partnerships with LangChain and CrewAI, which has since been adopted by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, and a range of AI startups including Mistral, Pydantic, and Agno. Barkai also reveals a co-launch with Google of A2UI version 0.0—a declarative generative UI spec—which shipped less than a week before the talk. AG UI addresses a fundamental problem: agents break the request-response paradigm that has powered web applications for 30 years. They are long-running, need to stream work in progress, support mid-run steering, and exchange structured and unstructured data simultaneously.
Barkal introduces a three-tier generative UI spectrum: controlled generative UI (pixel-perfect, deterministic, developer-specified components), declarative generative UI (Lego-like building blocks assembled on demand by the agent, as in A2UI), and fully generative UI. Code examples in React using CopilotKit’s hooks and Zod schemas illustrate how developers implement each tier. The talk is immediately relevant for frontend engineers and platform teams evaluating how to build agent-native user interfaces that go beyond text-box chat interfaces.
📺 Source: DeepLearningAI · Published May 21, 2026
🏷️ Format: Keynote Launch
