Lately I've seen the rise of many interesting discussions around AI Agents, how they could shape the future of human interactions, making UIs obsolete and disrupting UI Design, or jeopardising companies that are gate keepers of their data/services through their own UI, if they won't adapt and develop an AI Agent integration they might be left behind, but the price of such integration might be big tech AI lock-in. That gave me a lot of food for thought, I'm not worried about my job, I actually am an enthusiast but also have some uncertainties. so I'm leaving here some points below and I'd really like to hear some opinions from this community.
* A Chatbot or Agent is still a UI with some kind of UX but in a different form? I personally see Chatbots as "specialized" UIs like I think games are.
* Chatbot responses do already embed rich widgets for improving the UX, and sometimes nothing better than a good old table exists for showing some structured data, so I don’t necessarily see UI components going away.
* Then who would stop one to develop an agent integration on booking dot com that would produce a rich widget on my home screen with a summary of current offers or a price tracking chart?
* And, even if it's all audio interactions we would still need to develop some "Audio UX" guidelines for making great audio experiences or not?
* At some point in the long list of interactions, I feel like we may want to see and/or touch something, I mean we still are humans, and humans like physical things to touch, like pushing buttons.
* Let's should not forget UIs may also exist as a fallback or for accessibility purposes, so I can’t see UIs going away, rather them becoming multimodal and adaptable maybe?
Xerox Alto was the first GUI ever (ironically I chatgpted that in a text based interaction :D) and the leap from text to GUI was really not that obvious either I would think. I think we're in the text based computer era now and can't just know exactly where we will be in the next few years.
Now here's my crazy idea that will likely put me in a mental category: I think the ultimate "UI" will be intuition. It's not that I ask an AI to do something or fetch whatever I want. It's the act of just having constant access to all information and action subconsciously. Now for that you'd have to wait until Elon plants a chip in everyone or someone comes up with a less dystopian device :D
If you ever get to more clear answers to your questions please do share. Like I said I am very curious about this topic.