Conversational agents will not replace every app interface

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 54:31

   Very interesting. The other big question I had around mentor is, what do you see as a future of the user experience in software? The mentor experience is the now increasingly familiar AI sidebar that kind of wraps the legacy application, right? what you used to do through drag and drop it can now do through tool use and now you have both but then you also have this like mcp paradigm where i sit in some other software entirely or maybe i even take a walk and just use voice mode to talk to my agent about it that way and the the tools are never perhaps even visualized in the way that they are on the core platform what are you anticipating in terms of skating where the puck's going to be? Where are you trying to get ahead of those trends? Yeah, great question. I personally still imagine that a year from now, I'm going to

2. 55:26

   have more than 100 apps on my phone, right? Like I do think that the user experiences for different things that we want to don't all lend themselves into a conversational experience. Like we think principally about whether we're doing it voice mode or text or whatever. Now, I don't know how it evolves. I do think there's a real significant chance that a lot of software as we know it today is just widgetized into little things that show up in the flow of conversation, right? So like, I think about the Google Maps question. Google Maps is one of the most useful things on my phone.

3. 56:05

   I use it every single day, whether it's to look up a place to order a pizza or it's to navigate me to, you know, a destination where I'm driving or walking. around a foreign city that I don't know well. So I'm like, okay, when does Google Maps just become part of my conversation with an AI? Okay, could happen immediately. Like, I could just say, chat GPT, give me turn-by-turn instructions on how to get from here to there.

4. 56:31

   But I still want to know, like, what the hell does the world look like around me? How is it shaped? What am I going to pass on the way? And I don't think the conversational experience is going to lend itself perfectly there. Microcosm of, you know, of the whole challenge you're putting forward here, but an example of where I think things will still be different. I think for a variety of reasons that could be oriented around privacy, that could be oriented around compliance, that could be oriented just purely around user preference and experience, that we're going to still see a wide variety of software interaction paradigm in the future.

5. 57:10

   Now, I'm open to the idea that the big monolithic chunks of that that we have today, a portal I go to with 80 features, might be delivered very differently in little chunks just when I need them in the flow of other work. And that's going to be interesting to watch and see it develop. I think that we, at our user conference in June, we showed a pretty compelling demonstration of one of our banking customers initiating loan applications through a consumer conversation with Claude about a home remodel.

6. 57:50

   Hey, let's think about this new stove and all these things. And like, geez, this is going to be expensive. I might need some money. Do you know you're pre-approved for a loan for $30K? Would you like to initiate that application? and a seamless flow from the conversation in Claude straight through to the mobile app of the bank with the same agent operating behind the scenes in both contexts, seamlessly carrying the conversation through, recognizing which typically required assets you need for a loan application process that they already have because you're already a customer of the bank.

7. 58:27

   They don't need to ask you for your bank statement. and straight through processing that kind of application through the back end where there's agents doing the work or making recommendations to humans in the loop at every phase of that process and streamlining the entire experience for a consumer. That's interesting, right? There's a lot of the workload moves directly into the agent experience, if you will, But there's still some software assets there, in this case in the form of a mobile application, that need to be there for a series of compliance and privacy and regulatory requirements.

8. 59:08

   Will those change and evolve over time so that's not needed? I don't know. We'll see. I think the interesting question for me is kind of not how are all the things going to become the same, but what will the imagination now of creators produce? Now that AI and platforms like OutSystems remove so many of the typical, traditional constraints of building amazing experiences.