Competition will heat up as AI-native challengers begin to chip away at market leaders across business processes and create new market segments that were previously unaddressed by software. In addition, new entrants are rapidly growing and disrupting the market with leaner operating models.
I think it's very, very early days in this new wave of AI, particularly on the user interface interaction side of things. The technology developed very quickly, but it takes human time to figure out the right interaction patterns.
The question dropped into the Slack channel before the user research summary. Before the problem was clearly defined. Before anyone asked if users actually needed this feature. Your product manager already generated three interface options in ChatGPT. Now they're asking which one to build. Not whether to build. Not why to build. Which. And when you slow the conversation down to ask those questions, you're about to discover that strategic thinking now reads as bottleneck behavior.
For most of computing history, designers have been the authors of the visible world. They shaped the screens we tap, the icons we recognize, the patterns we repeat until they feel second nature. From Xerox PARC to Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, nearly every interface worth designing has already been designed. The metaphors of interaction: the desktop, folders, windows, menu, tap, swipe, are now complete, endlessly iterated but rarely reinvented.
Meanwhile AI chat suffers from the same problem from command lines to Alexa - how can i remember what to ask? Only this time the problem is exacerbated by the fact that AI is capable of practically anything making the task less one of remembering commands but a creative one of coming up with great questions or delivering an interface to discover them and then wrapping the resulting prompts as buttons.
