No hands
Agents can read now. Browse, reason, look at a screen. In Singapore they can’t do much with any of it.
Klook, Chope, SIA, FairPrice, Changi, Carousell, Gojek, foodpanda. No MCP server, no skill, on any of the big boys. Grab and Shopee: one small third-party publisher covers both, live since late September, sign-in required. Lazada: one browser-automation skill, fourteen installs. Meanwhile Notion, GitHub and Stripe ship their own. Didn’t try booking anything. Just looked for doors. A hundred million dollars on techies and tokens can't buy you that much? Or maybe the crowd isn't ready just yet - no agents so no agent frontends, or no agent frontends -> No agents?
Odd, for the country that wrote the first agentic AI governance framework. Policy for agents everywhere except the shops and goods and services people actually need to live and play.
Probably not carelessness. Maybe just that nobody is asking for it? Singpass and OTPs assume a human holding the phone. And Singapore is small, so nobody’s agent was built for Chope first. We always get things last or late - maybe this isn't so different.
So agents manually operate the website instead, puling levers and cranks to mimic a human arms and legs and fingers on a browser. Works until the checkout gets redesigned, or a CAPTCHA or a Cloudfare. Then it plans stalls at “book” and I need to DO IT MYSELF...
Fixes are boring.
Still open. Whether the services want agents at the counter at all.