The most important for users is achieving goals more easily and at lower cost, rather than if a need is met by an agent, an app, a website, or a call, Tan Dai, president of ByteDance's unit Volcano Engine, told Yicai in a response to an AI phone-sparked debate on the era of agents or apps. The real challenge isn't about which era wins, but whether agents can overcome foundational capability support and real-world deployment readiness to meet high standards in robustness, runtime stability, scalability, and data security, he added.