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Summary
AI agents are on the rise: people are talking about them, getting excited, and putting infrastructure into place to support them. You may be asked to design agents soon—or you may want to think through your product as an agent in order to get a leg up on your competition. What’s different about designing for agents? Are you ready? Rosenfeld author Christopher Noessel published Designing Agentive Technology back in 2017, and it seems like the world is just now catching up. Join Chris as he recaps the core ideas from that book, how agents have evolved since publication, and what it all might mean since the explosion of generative AI. Takeaways include… What is an agent? How do agents differ and complement other modes of interaction? Why are people getting excited about it now? What does generative AI bring to the agentive table?
Key Insights
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An agent is defined as any entity with the ability to take actions and choose among them on behalf of a principal.
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Agents differ from assistants mainly in user attention: agents act autonomously often outside user awareness, while assistants engage the user actively.
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Designing agentive technology involves 27 unique use cases including setup, monitoring, alerts, handoff, and disengagement.
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There are four modes of agency in systems: manual (user does all work), assistant (user mostly involved), agentive (AI does most work), and automation (AI fully handles).
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Agentive systems do work outside the user’s attention, enabling an order of magnitude more tasks done for users than traditional interfaces.
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AI agentic backends orchestrated by large language models solve limitations like hallucinations by delegating subtasks to specialized agents.
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De-skilling and overreliance on AI agents present major risks, requiring new design patterns called cognitive forcing functions to maintain human skills.
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Ethical concerns include hidden biases, corporate interests influencing agent decisions, and users being unaware of these agentic influences.
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The rise of agents presents huge business opportunities because they provide value continuously without demanding active user attention.
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UX designers must adapt to AI agent workflows and advocate for human-centered design to avoid being cut out of AI product development processes.
Notable Quotes
"An agent is anything that displays agency—the ability to take actions and choose which actions to take."
"An assistant is helping you do the task with your attention on it, whereas an agent does its work out of your attention."
"We are dealing with AI systems that are sophisticated enough to do the majority of the work for people."
"The AI parses a complicated request, makes a plan, and orchestrates which specialized agents handle the steps."
"Agents do their work outside of the user's attention, which means they can operate at a vastly larger scale than traditional products."
"Every time we hand a task over to a system, we slowly lose the ability to do it ourselves. That is de-skilling."
"Corporations are nefarious about inserting their self-interest into algorithms, and agentic systems risk hiding those interests more deeply."
"The future of design roles will shift as agents handle tedious tasks, freeing humans to focus on challenging problems."
"AI is one of the most interesting and complicated technologies that humanity has ever created, and it desperately needs design."
"We cannot just say ‘fast thinkers, you’re now baristas.’ Society needs to address how AI will affect different cognitive styles."
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