Several AI product innovations have been announced by Big Tech, like a new generative AI version of Alexa with a specifically large language model, Microsoft’s Copilot built into the Windows OS, Google’s Bard straight into Gmail, Docs, and Maps, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT enabling user voice prompts and image uploads. The emphasis is on enhancing user experience (UX) design, offering AI tools to AI-aware people, and allowing them to experiment with AI models and produce new results. Chatbots, image generators, copilot processes, and personal assistant gadgets are examples of this.
Big Tech corporations are driving this trend, which I discussed a few weeks ago with Cassie Kozyrkov, who just left a decade-long position as Google’s senior decision scientist to go out on her own.
AI created for customers
I’d already been thinking about how ChatGPT’s introduction in November 2022 had ushered in a completely new way of thinking about UX design in AI. ChatGPT’s simple, user-friendly interface hid the complexity of the AI beneath the hood while emphasising that, yes, this is an AI, and users are urged to interact with it to obtain what they want.
According to Kozyrkov, earlier, AI design was not about addressing people at all but rather about AI system builders. As she put it in a blog post, “Having a nontechnical user notice the AI element could be as embarrassing as drawing that user’s awareness to issues of JavaScript versus HTML.”
Kozyrkov now claims in her presentations that GenAI is “a UX revolution, not an AI revolution.”
AI has hitherto been a “subtle, unobtrusive element in software applications,” she noted. AI is now being placed in the hands of individuals to transform into whatever they choose. AI, she added, is the raw material for creativity and productivity, and humans can utilise it in new and intriguing ways.
Big Tech has multidisciplinary teams
In an interview following the recent AI Native event in New York City, Kozyrkov told me that “one person does it all—that is such a myth.” That is not a pleasant atmosphere for UX professionals to work in, she noted.
But, she said, AI is now an area where massive, multidisciplinary teams exist. “Fortunate enough that we’ve been able to recruit these interdisciplinary folk,” she says, big tech companies.
She predicts that things will alter in the AI business in the future. Kozyrkov wants engineering to go beyond being the most labour-intensive to being comparatively less labour-intensive and design using further determination.”
She stressed that it is still early days: “When you think about what it takes to create these systems? What are we creating? Are we developing tools and ways to enable a leader’s wishes to be carried out? “We have been able to recruit such interdisciplinary individuals,” she says about big tech companies.
A ‘radical turn’ in the design of AI-powered products
The recent Big Tech announcements represent a “radical pivot in product philosophy,” pushing customers to connect directly with AI components. Generative AI is gradually being integrated into our processes, creative experiences, and daily lives. Users are AI-aware, assessing the utility and effect of these goods for themselves, regardless of how they input text, photos, or their voices. This event demonstrates the power of artificial intelligence.
