Why UX is the next frontier of AI

The rise of artificial intelligence will actually increase the demand for user experience skills in the years to come. Here’s why.

UX specialists may understandably feel uneasy these days.

AI seems to be disrupting their profession at a dizzying pace. Every day brings a new innovation that appears to redefine how we carry out the most basic tasks (writing a text, editing a photo…), how we interact with interfaces, and above all, how we build user experiences in a world soon expected to run on “autopilot” thanks to AI agents quietly governing the smallest moments of our daily lives, at work and at home.

So why bother thinking about user experience when machines are already anticipating our every need and desire from the traces we leave on the big digital platforms?

Contrary to this collective anxiety, I believe that UX, far from being a discipline on the way out, will instead become a major issue in the artificial intelligence revolution.

First, let’s bust a myth that seems to be spreading: no, the rise of AI does not eliminate the need to think about user experience — and the best example is none other than ChatGPT, the ultimate AI icon for the mainstream audience.

Although AI’s disruptive potential has been in the air for at least twenty years, it was ChatGPT that suddenly made it accessible to the masses thanks to a feature that propelled this innovation into a new dimension: the ability to “talk” with AI through a dialogue box where you can express needs and questions, just as you’d chat with a friend on WhatsApp or Messenger. In other words, thanks to an improvement in user experience that suddenly made tangible what previously belonged to the realm of developers — or even science fiction.

UX as a key differentiator

If you look closely, most of the Internet’s most revolutionary applications and services built their success with user experience as the engine of value creation.

The social media phenomenon, for instance, began in the late 1990s with the arrival of the first blogs and discussion forums. Yet it was a small site called Facebook which, starting in 2005, captured these emerging cultural practices by offering a standardized, safe and convenient environment where anyone could freely share their thoughts with friends, without having to install a WordPress blog on a dedicated server. 

With Facebook and other social networks, creating digital content became something everyone could do. The rest is history.

The same goes for other digital giants that placed UX at the core of their promise from the very beginning. Netflix? Stop pirating your favorite series and movies in poor quality — watch them everywhere in HD. Spotify? Same inspiration, but for music. Uber? Move around the city more easily and stop going broke on taxis. And so on.

We can predict that so-called “generative” AI will be no exception. Sure, AI regularly achieves amazing leaps that leave us in awe. Right now, we are in the eye of the storm, at the height of Gartner’s “hype cycle.” But it’s likely that progress will become more incremental in the coming years as the technology matures.

Understanding user needs will then become the key differentiator separating players in the market, just as it did for e-commerce (hello Amazon), email (hi Gmail), or smartphones (where the iPhone swept away pre-existing competitors thanks to its revolutionary UI).

In the short term, UX designers will of course face some turbulence, since the fantasy of 100% AI-generated sites and apps is currently widespread in companies eager for the productivity gains this technology seems to promise.

In the long run, however, I remain convinced that the future looks bright for UX professions — especially since AI is far from being a tool integrated into the everyday life of the majority of users. 

To take the example of ChatGPT again: today we spend hours crafting the “perfect prompt” that will save us time and effort on a given professional task. But I doubt our neighbors are investing the same energy (unless they work in digital). Too complicated on a smartphone, too intimidating without the necessary language skills.

Tomorrow, then, the “prompt” will probably just be one of many ways to interact with AI. The rest remains to be invented — whether it’s training your own AI agent, monitoring its activity, or correcting its errors when it helps you manage your finances, optimize your energy consumption, or plan your next vacation. 

In short, the challenge will be to make AI more human. And humanizing technology has always been at the heart of UX — and of the work done every day by the Ariad's specialists.

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