Evolution of Application UX with Gen AI

Sequoia had launched the list of 50 AI Companies of the future: https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/ai-50-2024/ and one of the notes in the article that intrigued me was:

Tomorrow, we expect to see UX and UI reimagined around the capabilities of AI. Replicating existing functions better and cheaper, will be followed by evolving entirely new user interfaces to deliver valuable new experiences.

The previous digital transformations around PC, Internet and Mobile - also had significant changes to the UX moving from Desktop Apps -> Web Applications -> Mobile Applications.

My thoughts on the evolution of UX with Gen AI:

Wave 1: Productivity Improvements with Basic Conversation Flows

This would be enhancements to existing application UX focused on:

1. Personalized Experiences: Leveraging Gen AI capabilities in the backend to offer personalized experiences in existing workflows. Ex. tailored product recommendations based on customer's preferences and past purchases.
2. Automations to improve productivity: We are already seeing productivity improvements across different functions in the organizations. Ex. Klarna's customer support productivity gain with AI Assistant: https://www.klarna.com/international/press/klarna-ai-assistant-handles-two-thirds-of-customer-service-chats-in-its-first-month/

Wave 2: Advanced Conversational Agent Interfaces

The next would be the evolution of applications with natural language agent interfaces - spanning across all your devices and IoT equipments with multi-modal text, speech, code, image and video capabilities.

1. Talking to your shopping agent for placing your shopping list order

1. Planning your day with the Planner agent on your mobile
2. Switching over to the voice agent on your car as you drive
3. Using your AI Pair Programmer Agent to co-develop your application

And the context being maintained across all the agents to ensure smooth handoff.

We did see some glimpses of this future in the Google Cloud Next events where Google announced a slew of agents.

Wave 3: Immersive Experiences with AR/VR

This is still some time off, but expect Gen AI's capabilities will provide a huge boost to the adoption of AR/VR experiences.

Ex. Immersive learning experiences for students

Virtual meeting room experiences - think about the cool demos during Covid times, suspect many of those will become real and usable.