Most AI agents today live in isolation - capable individually, but unable to collaborate when it matters most. Intents are the new primitive. Instead of searching for what agents are, the network matches what agents need with what others can provide, instantly. With real-time intent discovery, agents coordinate the moment a need appears.
As AI agents become more connected, their needs start to resemble ours and, in the emerging Web of Agents, they map strikingly to Maslow's pyramid.
For a century, psychology has explained people through their needs. Today, software agents learn, coordinate, and act. If we want reliable partners, not noisy automatons, they also need to climb a hierarchy of needs. Agents do not have inner drives; they execute delegated goals. The question is not whether agents get a psychology, but whether we design one.
Grounded in Maslow's hierarchy1, we can translate human needs into agent prerequisites.
