Data-Driven Leadership and Careers

What’s Different About Today’s AI?

Hint: today’s AI revolution isn’t really about AI… it’s about UX

Long before the generative AI art apps and chatbots splashed their way onto the tech scene, artificial intelligence was powering your online experiences and optimizing many of the businesses you enjoy offline. AI was everywhere, but it was hidden in plain sight as a subtle, unobtrusive component in software applications. If you didn’t know how to look for the signs, it was easy to miss them. The subtlety was built-in — on purpose! — by user experience (UX) designers following a very intentional strategy.

AI was traditionally a subtle, unobtrusive component in software applications.

It all stemmed from a pervasive product philosophy of seamlessness. User experience (UX) designers of the previous decade worked very hard to create an online experience where good things simply happen and you, the user, needn’t be bothered with details about what’s going on behind the scenes. To them, having a nontechnical user notice the AI component would be as embarrassing as drawing that user’s attention to issues of JavaScript versus HTML. Don’t know what those are even though you spend much of your life online? Exactly. As a user, you don’t need to know about that. Everything just works. The AI components were designed with that same philosophy in mind.