Agentic UX

AI products fail at the interface, not the model

Most AI product failures aren't model failures. They're interface failures. The model produces a result; the interface fails to make it usable, trustworthy, or actionable. I've watched this happen repeatedly across analytics tools, recommendation systems, and AI-assisted workflows.

The gap between output and action

An AI system produces output. A user needs to act on it. Between those two things is a design problem. What does the user need to understand before they can act? What context are they missing? What could go wrong if they act on bad output?

Most AI interfaces skip this entirely. They surface the output and leave the user to figure out the rest. That works fine when the stakes are low and the output is obviously correct. It falls apart in real enterprise contexts where outputs are probabilistic, users are accountable, and mistakes have downstream consequences.

Three patterns I see fail most often

What good interface design adds

Good AI interface design treats the output as the beginning of a conversation, not the end. It shows provenance — where did this come from? It surfaces the right uncertainty signals — not just a number, but what that number means in context. It provides controls for the user to inspect, edit, and override.

This isn't complicated UX. It's mostly about deciding what information belongs next to the output, and building trust incrementally rather than demanding it up front. The model doesn't need to be perfect. The interface needs to make the model's limitations navigable.

  • Confidence without context. The system says "87% confidence" with no explanation of what that means for this specific output. Users either ignore it or over-trust it.
  • No path to verify. Users can see the answer but can't inspect the reasoning. There's no way to check whether the output makes sense before acting on it.
  • Error states that dead-end. When the AI produces something wrong or uncertain, the interface has nowhere to go. No fallback, no escalation, no way to correct course.