Michael Whitaker

Almost everything about how we’re building enterprise software products is changing right now. For years when you built SaaS products, your entire design focus was how a user would interact with the system to accomplish their task, by themselves or collaboratively. Now many of the core design challenges are more about how the user will work with AI Agents to do this task. This turns the questions into how the user will setup, deploy, orchestrate, or provide context to AI Agents to execute work, and then review and incorporate their work after. Does this happen in an existing UI? Do you do this through chat? Is it through task list or queue? Is it through a workflow builder? Do you describe it as an Agent or just productive the specific outcome the customer wants? You can see the early differences playing out just in the AI coding space right now, where there’s a debate between the IDE, terminal, web UI, or just using slack. In all cases, one thing that seems to be clear is in many ways, to the user, software directionally gets simpler. The nobs, toggles, switches, and components needed for people to execute tasks are less necessary in a world of AI Agents. The APIs to these capabilities still matter for the AI Agents to use (so they don’t go away), but they’re primarily leveraged in the background. And when they eventually show up for the user, it’s more for advanced use cases, exception handling, or the review process, as opposed to the common activity. We’re in easily the most interesting period of software design that we’ve ever been in. We have to design for users as well as autonomous agents at the same time. And we’re only in the beginning phases of what that looks like.