Intelligent Experiences by Design
Enterprise AI Will Create A New Discipline: Intelligent Experience Design (IXD)
If you work closely (and long enough) with technology, you’ll see history repeat. You’ll say, “But David, AI is different”!
Well, yes and no.
Let’s first address the yes. Yes, AI is significant, more transformational than many of its predecessors, and unique compared to digital innovations such as AR/VR or that phase of the Internet when Ubers and AirBnBs were born. It’s probably bigger than formative iterations of the Web, such as social media. However, it also has a lot in common with how these things have become commercialized in the past, which is the focus of this piece. See, I have this theory that we’re still in the hype phase of AI, but that doesn’t mean it’s a fad or overhyped—what it means is that it’s going to create entirely new fields, practices, and areas of expertise as we get to what I am calling “The GSD ERA,” short for getting shit done. Hoowah, you still with me?
OK, LFG.
The thesis I will be laying out is an area near and dear to me, as I was there for its birth—this is the field of “UX” or user experience design. My thesis, informed by the past while looking into the future, is that, similar to the birth of UX, we will see the additional formalization of a related sister field I view as “IX,” short for Intelligent Experience. I’ll break this down a bit more, but first, let’s take a quick step back and assess where I think we are:
AI Hype: From TBD To GSD
As I’ve discussed, we’re approaching “Peak AI/BS” regarding the AI Hype Cycle. This is good news because after what I believe will be several “corkscrew corrections,” we’ll be on our way to the GSD (Get Shit Done) Era of Enterprise AI Integration. Unlike the dramatic Dot.com bubble burst, which I lived through, I doubt we’ll see one big AI-fueled “pop.” Instead, as respectable, risk-averse organizations experience their first AI misfires, we’ll see some tapered expectations, more rigor, and better *use cases* emerge around AI integration:
Part of what will get us to the GSD era is the formalization of new disciplines. I was gainfully employed during the dot-com bubble burst. Mainly because one of the long-term clients we worked with needed the right kind of assistance paired with the correct use case—evolving the first iteration of their e-commerce-enabled Website into a leading, best-in-class digital experience. During these days, the well-established field now known as “UX” did not exist—in fact, the job titles were different. We had “Information Architects,” and the idea that a Website should be “usable” was starting to become a thing. UX and usability experts such as Jacob Nielson and Jared Spool became names that built the foundation of this emerging new practice, which took decades to mature. With it came advocacy for the end user, digital design best practices, and a force that could push back on engineering, which often placed technology in front of human heuristics, needs, wants, and desires.
We are in the same place now with AI. The money is pushing the tech, and the tech is defining the use cases and, unfortunately, some of our human experiences with it. It’s worth noting that this phase of AI will continue to yield promising and surprising experiments. A recent example is Google’s NotebookLM, specifically the “Audio Overview” feature. This feature provides an audio overview from text-based documents and brilliantly converts it into a lifelike “talk show” format between two AI-generated hosts. This single feature alone could be meaningfully commercialized. Still, for now, it exists as a somewhat random yet potential-filled feature, compliments of Google:
Oh, and a prediction on NotebookLM’s Audience Overview feature—you can bet that someone will take this idea (irrelevant to Google’s business model) and make it a standalone product. The best way would be to create dozens of “host” personalities and voices and target businesses and individuals who want to streamline podcasting and create podcasts that people want to listen to. These are the experiences to come, and to do them “right,” we’re gonna need a bigger tech boat that includes complementary disciplines. One of these disciplines will be IXD (Intelligent Experience Design).
UX+ IX: Intelligent Experiences Wanted
Things aren’t going to be tech/engineering-led for long. LLM and AI Chatbots have already set a standard for co-piloting with AI, but that’s just the beginning. Apple Intelligence has yet to set the standard for what it will feel like to interact on a consumer technology front with AI agent-like assistants that will help us complete tasks and generate output. These are early signs of what will complement the field known as user experience design. As I’ve discussed, LLMs have opened the door to conversational interfaces with AI-enabled technologies, which means GUI or graphic user interfaces will no longer be the only way we interface with tech—we also now have the “CUI” or the conversational user interface. However, this new paradigm comes with a new category: Intelligent experience, or “IX.”
During the nascent years of UX design as a discipline, a popular phrase among practitioners was: The end goal of creating the experience should be useful, usable, and desirable to the person interacting with and experiencing the product or service.
Useful: A strong value proposition and purpose that the experience would serve
Usable: Intuitive to use and easy to interact with
Desirable: Meeting not only rational needs but deep emotional ones as well
The useful, usable, and desirable mantra for what makes a great experience still holds water from my perspective, but as we enter the AI Era, we’ll need to make room for what will become part of the customer/employee/patient, etc. experience as AI technologies such as LLMs and agents evolve. We will get ever closer to intelligent experiences that feel “smart” and empathetic or emotionally intelligent. In that context, we’ll need the following experience guardrails:
Intelligent: Simulates or achieves the ability to “think.”
Intuitive: Interacts with human counterparts in a natural, emotionally aware manner
Anticipatory: Learns from and can anticipate the needs and emotional state of human collaborators.
Notice a couple of things? The terms above point away from users “using” a tool, service, product, app, etc., and feel more like a relationship. I propose that for IX and IX Design, we shift away from the mindset of “user” and toward interactions that add up to a relationship between the human and AI. Sound like science fiction? Well, we’re all talking/working with each other on screens now, right? It’s also worth noting that we’re looking at an AND, not an OR situation. Ideally, we’ll build a future of intuitive interactions (UX) AND intuitive intelligence (IX). The sum of both parts becomes the modern customer experience (CX).
Emotionally Intelligent AI and Empathetic CX
We have a long way to go and a lot of work to accomplish with what I outlined above. It’s important to remember that some, though not all, of what we’re talking about is applying a level of automation to things that are currently poorly automated or outsourced in a way that makes the customer experience painful. In one of the first pieces I wrote for Forbes, I discussed the concept of “Intelligent Automation.” i.e., improving things that could or should be automated vs. creating more sub-par experiences. IX designers will be tasked with achieving this and dealing with the realities of business pressures, such as efficiency and scale. This will be challenging work, but it will augment how we view the broader practice of CX:
I should know as I’ve been both a practitioner and advocate for more emotionally intelligent customer experiences. During my time with AI avatar startup Soul Machines, this was our north star, although the tech itself was still very much in development. I’ve talked about what the building blocks are for more emotionally intelligent experiences and the changing technologies bringing us closer to scaling this:
Will the machines eventually become emotionally intelligent? We’re not there yet, but we’re getting dang close to simulating it. In Sam Altman’s latest articulation of his vision, he talks about “The Intelligence Age” and uses many examples to illustrate his vision. Here’s one:
AI models will soon serve as autonomous personal assistants who carry out specific tasks on our behalf like coordinating medical care on your behalf. At some point further down the road, AI systems are going to get so good that they help us make better next-generation systems and make scientific progress across the board.
It’s not uncommon for the healthcare industry to be cited as one that will benefit society (and business), but Altman’s brief reference skips a ton of work that would need to be done to bring this part of the vision to life. Having an AI agent help you manage your healthcare needs sounds excellent. But what’s even better is an agent that would do it with a sense of emotional intelligence. One who understands how vulnerable a sick person feels and how lonely and isolating it can be. Looking at the opportunity from this lens, he would extend his thesis to:
The Emotionally Intelligent Age
The early signposts are visible. Hume is an AI startup focused on making the voice component of AI/LLM/Agentic systems feel more… human. The voices, responses, intonations, etc., not only sound more human-like and natural, but they begin to scratch the surface of what we perceive as emotional intelligence and empathy—a gateway to trust, which is a higher-order human-based value than “intelligence.”
So, that’s where much of this is going, and it will take designers, researchers, humanists, and ethicists to help us get there. For now, I’m bullish on the need for IX “designers” to become a part of the process—from validating the initial use cases (this is where so much of the work needs to start) to challenging the engineers who tackle the technological realities of doing the infrastructure work with the data. It will take a village; ultimately, we’ll live in a world where we still interact with technology using tools on screens. Still, we will also feel like we have relationships with our competent, emotionally aware AI agents and assistants, with whom we collaborate and ultimately, trust.
That would be an intelligent experience by design.
Visually yours,
Clever extention from UX to IX. Bravo.