There's a lot of buzz about AI agents, like OpenAI Operator and Perplexity Assistant. How might automation change how we think about UX and websites?
Robots that do more with less supervision—what could go wrong? We asked our community how this might shake up how we think about UX.
Welcome to the first installment of Double Click, a new series where we ask our community to weigh in on topics in tech and design that have bubbled up to the top of our feeds.
It’s official: The latest tech to rouse Big Feelings is agentic AI. You’ve probably seen the headlines about OpenAI’s Operator and Perplexity’s Assistant joining the party alongside offerings from Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google. Some corners of the internet are reacting with gusto. Olivia Moore, AI Apps Partner at Andreesen Horowitz, got Operator to pay a bill just by giving it a picture. “We are so back,” she posted on X. But others are experiencing “sheer unadulterated rage” at the idea of catering to trawlers, with one developer going so far as to build an infinite maze to trap them. So what does all this mean for how we create and consume sites? To get to the bottom of things, we asked our colleagues and collaborators to “double click” on the topic.
The great promise of agentic AI
Olivia Moore’s example captures why people are pumped about AI agents—namely, what they can take off our plates. Henry Modisett, Vice President of Design at Perplexity, points out that “AI should be how something works, not what you interact with.” Over Zoom, he brings up one of his favorite anecdotes about the R&D team at Apple: “They got a touchscreen working as a prototype and brought it to Jony Ive and Steve Jobs, who asked, ‘Okay, what do we do with it?’”
We’re in the what-do-we-do-with-it phase of agentic—and that’s energizing. “As a user, you don’t want the cognitive load of interfacing with a chatbot that has a name and a personality,” he continues. “You want to press a button and get the job done. Agentic reinvigorates the question of how much complexity is exposed to a user. It’s like starting a car—users don’t want to look under the hood to see how things are working. They want to just go somewhere.
How we can put it to work
It’s not about where we can go with individual AI agents, either. Box CEO Aaron Levie jumped on X to predict that agentic will “offer a new era in web interoperability,” working across platforms just like humans do. Does this mean we’ll finally have an answer for the toggle tax? One can only hope.
The truth is, we’re all tired of clicking through menus and sifting through our sea of open tabs. Manosai Eerabathini, Product Manager at Figma, cuts right to the chase: “We weren’t born to browse the web. We were born to be curious, create, and connect. Agents are simply the next leap—another level of abstraction that lets us focus on what matters.”
And before you start having flashbacks to sci-fi dystopias, Greg Huntoon, Design Advocates Manager at Figma assures us: “We’re not talking about a HAL 9000—a monolithic polymath. What we want are multiple agents with different expertise working together, like a well-oiled team.”
...
Comment