As AI agents become the primary 'users' of software, design priorities must change. Optimization will move away from visual hierarchy for human eyes and toward structured, machine-legible systems that agents can reliably interpret and operate, making function more important than form.

A major focus for OpenAI's design team is the growing gap between what their models are capable of and what users actually know they can do. The design team's job is to create interfaces and tools that expose the model's full potential to the user.

The best UI for an AI tool is a direct function of the underlying model's power. A more capable model unlocks more autonomous 'form factors.' For example, the sudden rise of CLI agents was only possible once models like Claude 3 became capable enough to reliably handle multi-step tasks.

The current user experience for AI tools is too complex, forcing users to make choices like which model or mode to use. The next major step is a unified, consolidated interface where the AI intelligently handles resource allocation behind the scenes, simply delivering 'intelligence'.

The next frontier for conversational AI is not just better text, but "Generative UI"—the ability to respond with interactive components. Instead of describing the weather, an AI can present a weather widget, merging the flexibility of chat with the richness of a graphical interface.

At OpenAI, the first question is "Can we solve this with the model (tokens) instead of pixels?" This treats the AI as the primary design material, pushing designers to think about interaction and behavior before creating bespoke user interfaces.

Vanta is moving beyond chat-based AI to develop agents that can generate entire, task-specific user interfaces on the fly. This "on-demand software" can guide a user through a workflow with a custom-built UI that disappears once the task is complete.

AI will fundamentally change user interfaces. Instead of designers pre-building UIs, AI will generate the necessary "forms and lists" on the fly based on a user's natural language request. This means for the first time, the user, not the developer, will be the one creating the interface.

As AI models become proficient at generating high-quality UI from prompts, the value of manual design execution will diminish. A professional designer's key differentiator will become their ability to build the underlying, unique component libraries and design systems that AI will use to create those UIs.