Column: Conscious Experience Design

In early 2025, the buzzword dominating in corporate circles is agentic artificial intelligence (AI). Many organizations are now creating new departments and special initiatives; and any article that talks about AI regularly includes the term. But what exactly is agentic AI, and how do we, as UX designers, approach it?

Agentic AI represents a significant evolution from traditional AI models. Instead of merely automating individual tasks, agentic AI systems can operate semi-independently, executing a multitude of tasks that require decision-making, analysis, and adaptation. This shift allows businesses to assign AI agents to collections of functions and even to cover entire roles with minimal human intervention.

But the transformation goes beyond automation. It signals a fundamental shift in computing itself. We are progressing from a world of fixed, app-based user experiences to a dynamic, learning-driven ecosystem in which AI agents proactively assist and respond to users and evolve over time. Read More

Today, artificial intelligence (AI) is ubiquitous. It’s everywhere—a sea change affecting all aspects of life at a rate far faster and more far reaching than anything we’ve experienced thus far. AI promises intelligent companions and copilots that simplify and enrich our daily activities and social interactions at work, in our community, and in our domestic life. The vision is a more pervasive, omnipresent, and active fabric of intelligence that seamlessly wraps around and through all the spaces of people’s lives––ready to activate on command.

However, the path to this vision and its widespread adoption requires progressive design approaches to support its evolution over time. During the formative stages of this technology, UX designers must leverage their expertise to design new user interfaces that effectively leverage dynamic visual affordances and multisensory cues to better guide discoverability and cooperation with fully integrated AI intelligence. Over time, these explicit cues and indicators may recede as the adoption of seamless interactions takes hold. But until then, the practice of visually enhancing the access to and activation of intelligence is necessary. Read More

As artificial-intelligence (AI) technology advances, traditional user-experience methods must adapt to effectively address the dynamic and relational nature of new autonomous agents. The state of user interfaces has shifted dramatically from interactive systems with fixed, finite states to adaptive AI agents that are capable of flexible, even infinite interactions. Today’s AI-powered user interfaces don’t just respond to commands, they adapt, learn, and interact in ways that mimic human conversations and interactions.

As AI agents evolve to exhibit open-ended interactions, prototyping becomes crucial for UX designers to truly understand and effectively test these dynamic systems—going far beyond the requirements of traditional user-interface design. In this new era of the design of autonomous-agent experiences, UX designers need to more frequently and rapidly prototype throughout the design process and strengthen their skills in computational design to achieve optimal success. Read More