Can an AI agent set up your product?

Dashboards, once essential for simplifying complex tasks and enabling non-engineers to configure SaaS infrastructure, are becoming bottlenecks in the era of AI-assisted development. While dashboards allowed for a user-friendly interface to manage configurations in the early days of cloud computing, the shift towards Infrastructure as Code has rendered many manual dashboard interactions obsolete. This evolution has introduced a friction point, as AI agents, which are increasingly responsible for setting up and deploying applications, struggle with dashboards designed for human interaction rather than programmatic access. Despite the availability of APIs, most infrastructure products still require some human intervention for initial setup, resulting in a mismatch between the speed of code generation and the pace of infrastructure configuration. To fully embrace automation, infrastructure companies must rethink their setup processes, ensuring they are accessible and operable by AI agents without human input. This shift would not only accelerate development but also democratize access, allowing more people to bring their ideas to fruition without needing in-depth operational expertise. In this emerging landscape, dashboards will transform from interactive control panels into informative displays that monitor and explain the actions of autonomous systems, requiring companies to prioritize agent-first design over human-oriented interfaces.