Crafting intelligent interfaces. (4/8)

While consumer applications invest disproportionally in reducing friction, the traditional enterprise software approach has been to build functional interfaces that "do the job".

Once built, often uninspiring and barely functional interfaces stick, as change, test, release cycle is costly, causing years of organisational "pain and drift".

Intelligent interfaces are about culture

Effective deployment of AI demands reimagined organisation, leaner, more productive workforce, where culture shifts to decision making and processing gets delegated to AI co-pilots / hybrid workforce.

Building is the easy part.

As AI is getting pretty good at building the imagined user experiences, we need more imagination, taste and keen eye for detail. (Shekhar Kirani coined the term, Imagineer to make this point - https://lnkd.in/g72nB9nT)

Best user experiences may be invisible.

Work happens in background. Decision making happens in the foreground. Insights must be surfaced. Actions can be taken on web or text.

Building such interfaces require a deep understanding of the business user and their day in life.

Engineers need deep curiosity, business understanding and keen observation to build such interfaces.

Architecture shift: Loosely coupled interface components may become the norm

Small, testable and certified reliable digital interface components that delight and can be wired effortlessly (& hydrated securely with enterprise data) into a large complex workflow architecture, would offer flexibility to change interfaces / software, with same speed that organisations would like to evolve their culture.

This is key to ensuring that organisational culture / design isn't hostage to the SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle).

Software interfaces require three new constructs, which are likely to become standard in enterprise software...

Context engineered, special purpose role + task aligned co-pilots and tooling custom built for performing tasks.

Work-diffs, audits and overrides - ability to visually understand and override work performed by a potentially hallucinating agent.

Policy enablement that automatically surfaces tasks for human review or AI peer review.