10,000 feet

An analogy to level set…

Imagine a stapler suspended in the middle of a big mold of pink Jell-O. Basic metal stapler. Gleeful dome of gelatin.

This is how I think of a valuable UX/CX.

The solid stapler represents the core product offering, at times unexciting, however undeniably useful in some way.

The sweet Jell-O represents the ~ experience~ layer surrounding the core product, all of the other functionality within a product offering to support people’s ancillary needs—beyond just “stapling.”

The Jell-O is the mechanism for delivering additional value, and for the past 10 years, this mechanism has been a delightful digital experience.

7,000 feet

The last experience paradigm: product+digital 

It was the decade of the Domino’s Pizza Tracker and TurboTax guided flow. We moved analog experiences into our desktop computers and phones, and the experience surrounding the world’s core product completely transformed. 

As this happened, the CX/UX became inextricable from the mobile or desktop screens where the experience lived. 

I’m recalling the pre-digital era of CX/UX so we can remember that experience paradigms are malleable over time. Just because a modern experience is essentially the same thing as “mobile” today, doesn’t mean this will always be the case. 

In fact, it’s pretty clear that, with GenAI, a new mechanism for delivering differentiated value has emerged.

AI is the new Jell-O. And it will change everything.

5,000 feet

The new experience paradigm: product+partner

A year after the world was introduced to the shocking power of large language models, our collective response to the technology has been to unleash AI  “copilots,” “companions,” “assistants,” “agents,” and “navigators” on just about every product experience. 

Today’s AI assistants sit on the side of the UX/CX, often tucked away in a chat drawer. They offer valuable help with isolated use cases—like a more competent version of “Clippy” from the early Microsoft era.  

• Did you arrive late to a meeting in progress? The Zoom ‘AI Companion’ will tell you if your name has been mentioned and what was discussed so far. 

• Need to create a timeline for a conference? Google’s ‘AI Collaborator’ will build you a first draft of a spreadsheet—right in the Sheets app.   

In their first iteration, these AI assistants are relatively limited in their abilities. It’s commonplace to describe these like, “having an intern built into the product.” 

However, just like any intern, their capabilities will grow. And it’s relatively easy to imagine how this technology will transform every UX/CX: from a solo digital endeavor into a partner-based experience. 

A fully partner-based experience is easier to conceptualize when you look at the most advanced AI assistant on the market, Github Copilot. 

GitHub's Copilot launched in October 2021; it has already transitioned from its 'intern era’ to a full-fledged coding partner–flexing its skills to write code from a prompt and find bugs in a code base. 

One fact clearly illustrates the power of a fully partner-based experience: 67% of all Java code today is written by Copilot—not the developer. In this experience, the AI Partner is pulling significant weight.

This starts to pull the curtain back on what the partner-based future of products will look like—and how traditional digital experiences simply won’t be able to compete.

I believe in 5 years, we will expect to interact with every product as a partner—by communicating directly with it to execute functionality and by assuming it will pull cognitive weight for us.

We will look back on today’s traditional digital/mobile experiences with confusion and ask ourselves, “how was that ever enough?!”

And every product will be judged on the strength of its built-in partner.

Ground  

Our role as innovators in the new paradigm  

Much attention has been given to the value of conversational interfaces: that GenAI represents a new UI interaction, where users don’t have to clumsily fiddle with interfaces but can simply command an AI partner to execute functionality. 

I believe this is valuable; however, I think the real value of a partner-based experience is being able to rely on an AI partner's advanced skillset to pull cognitive weight for you.  

We will expect refrigerators to manage the supply of yogurt inside, bank accounts to help us make the right spending decisions, and accounting software to do the bookkeeping for us (…all while communicating with it in natural language).

It’s a version of CX/UX that we’ve dreamed of—but we haven’t been able to accomplish with brittle hard-coded rules, push alerts, and tracking functionality alone.

Or without the democratization of AI through an API that will give anyone access to a powerful foundational model.

In the future, our new job as innovators will not be to design endless digital features; it will be to leverage the capabilities of LLMs to design the right “skills” for our AI partners.

So where to start? 

• Start by building an intuition for what GenAI can do. We’ve identified 12 key skills that can be used to solve customer/user needs across every industry. 

• Dedicate resources to envisioning your partner-based experience of the future and the key functionality of your AI partner.

• Identify the 3 MVP use cases of your AI partner. These should be low-risk use cases—not random functionality. They should also ladder up to a bigger capability. Run a proof of concept for these 3 use cases to assess feasibility.

• Zoom out, beyond what’s possible today, and imagine what a fully partner-based CX/UX looks like. This is a helpful exercise to illuminate the power of this new paradigm.

What an adventure!   

What an adventure we’re on; you can feel a new version of the world emerging underneath our feet. It’s scary and exciting at the same time.  

I’m having a lot of fun exploring the power of this new technology; this newsletter is a new adventure for me. And I’d appreciate your help. 

If you’re an innovation leader who is figuring out how to lead your organization into the AI era, feel free to schedule a call. 

• We offer a 3-hour AI Exploration Workshop to begin envisioning a partner-based approach for your UX/CX. 

• We also offer a 6-week GenAI Sprint to build a human-centered vision and strategy.

If you’re a designer, I’d appreciate you subscribing or sending this to someone who would care. 

Excitedly,
Alex