For several months, OpenAI, and ChatGPT in particular, have demonstrated what is possible with a user interface built on a large language model that can answer questions and create code or images. While that alone is noticeable, we can also interact and adjust the byproduct by having a sort of conversation with the AI. It really is amazing. But, and how transformative it could be when applied to business applications that are used every day.
What if you could build an interface on top of existing applications, so that instead of pointing and clicking, you could simply ask the computer to do a task and it would do it, depending on the underlying model of the applications or that of the company?
That would be a huge leap forward in computing. Before now, the biggest leap occurred in 1984, when Apple introduced the graphical user interface that began a slow shift away from the command line approach and finally went mainstream in the early 90s with the release of Windows 3.1 and then Windows 95.
We've had other attempts at UX, like voice interfaces like Siri and Alexa, and while they brought some changes on the consumer side, they're still not exactly the same as a computer producing work for us. It's just finding some answers and in some cases running simple commands.
It certainly hasn't changed the way we work, and that's the true measure of whether a new computing approach is truly transformative. If you could just write an action like “Help me onboard a new employee” or “Generate a monthly profit and loss statement” instead of explicitly guiding systems what to do, that would be a fundamental advance in UX design.
That's what generative AI has the potential to do, but like anything else, it's going to take some creativity to design these new interfaces in a fancy way, so you don't feel like you're stuck in your old point-and-click interface. click. It will probably also require more focused language models.
It is important to remember that although this is part of an ever-evolving AI landscape, we are still at the very beginning of this particular stage of the technology. Generative AI still has a long way to go, however. matter what the advertising machine suggests social. That's not to say there aren't some exciting possibilities, but it's still early days.
Ten years ago, people began to expect a consumer-like experience in their business software, the way they were used to interacting with software at home and on their phones and tablets. And now, expectations could be changing again: if people can't interact with your software in the same way as ChatGPT, they might end up demanding it.
A 2 year old can do it.
The sheer simplicity of ChatGPT is what has stood out to Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration at Cisco. The ease of use with which OpenAI actually came out and implemented ChatGPT, it's like a 2-year-old could use it, and I don't think AI systems in the past have been designed as elegantly, where a child that age can use it," Patel said.
He says it takes time and consideration to build something this simple. “And I think we'll see more innovation around user experience and innovation around custom data sets that can then be applied to very, very specific use cases,” he said.
Patel sees a future world where generative AI is really helping to build more elegant user interfaces. “We are in the first days in which the combination of multimodal and language models instructs how user interfaces are built, there are a lot of opportunities.”
He believes that as this develops, every user interface will eventually have a natural language component, where you could ask a question to perform certain actions and activities.
Assaf Baciu, Co-Founder and COO of Persian, which provides specialized generative AI solutions for marketing, believes such a UX transformation is coming. “Generative AI, at its core, allows you to interact with machines through natural language and will dramatically transform the way we interact with software,” he said.
He certainly sees the potential to change the way we use enterprise software by allowing us to ask the software for a response. “[For example, consider] the ability for Salesforce users to automatically generate sales tasks like composing emails, scheduling meetings, and preparing for the next interaction. This will evolve further with capabilities such as ChatGPT plugins, which will allow a user to execute tasks simply by describing them as the model connects to specific "features". For example, "create a report that shows each quarter with the lead in stage two and which salesperson they are assigned to along with their total reservation value."
How we interact with the interface is just the starting point when it comes to the impact of AI on enterprise software, according to Omar Johnson, founder and CEO of professional services firm Opus United and former chief marketing officer for Beats. . “He's going to start anticipating you. So I think enterprise software will start to move in the world more like a Netflix where it learns [your way of working] and sends you stuff.”
This all comes with one big caveat: We still don't know where this is all going. But it looks like we're in the midst of a technological tipping point where the way we interact with computers and software is about to change in elemental ways, and that's hard to ignore. And in some ways, AI is going to be a big part of that.
