I've been thinking about this a lot recently - having AI automate product manager user research. My thread of thought goes something like this:
0. AI can scour the web for user comments/complaints about our product and automatically synthesize those into insights.
1. AI research can be integrated directly into our product, allowing the user to complain to it just-in-time, whereby the AI would ask for clarification, analyze the user needs, and autonomously create/update an idea ticket on behalf of the user.
2. An AI integrated into the product could actually change the product UI/UX on its own in some cases, perform ad-hoc user research, asking the user "would it be better if things were like this?" and also measuring objective usability metrics (e.g. task completion time), and then use that validated insight to automatically spawn a PR for an A/B experiment.
3. Wait a minute - if the AI can change the interface on its own - do we even need to have a single interface for everyone? Perhaps future software would only expose an API and a collection of customizable UI widgets (perhaps coupled with official example interfaces), which each user's "user agent AI" would then continuously adapt to that user's needs?
> 3. Wait a minute - if the AI can change the interface on its own - do we even need to have a single interface for everyone? Perhaps future software would only expose an API and a collection of customizable UI widgets (perhaps coupled with official example interfaces), which each user's "user agent AI" would then continuously adapt to that user's needs?
Nice, in theory. In practice it will be "Use our Premium Agent at 24.99$/month to get all the best features, or use the Basic Agent at 9.99$ that will be less effective, less customizable and inject ads".
Well, at the end of the day, capitalism is about competition, and I would hope for a future where that "User Agent AI" is a local model fully controlled by the user, and the competition is about which APIs you access through them - so maybe "24.99$/month to get all the best features", but (unless you relinquish control to MS or Google), users wouldn't be shown any ads unless they choose to receive them.
We're seeing something similar in VS Code and its zoo of forks - we're choosing which API/subscriptions to access (e.g. GitLens Pro, or Copilot, or Cursor/Windsurf/Trae etc.), but because the client itself is open source, there aren't any ads.