When demonstrating, evaluating or using software products—whether deployed in an enterprise environment or delivered as SaaS—one of the main areas of focus is the user interface (UI).
Alongside the product’s functional and non-functional attributes, the UI’s aesthetic look and feel, ease of use and logical layout are key parameters in determining whether we would select one software product over another.
As a result, considerable time and effort have gone into developing UI design standards, and countless engineering and design hours are spent ensuring that the UI of a developed solution is as strong as it can be.
While this is a necessary and widely accepted practice for most traditional IT software solutions we have used to date – save perhaps for middleware – it unfortunately falls short when applied to AI solutions.
The whole premise of AI-based business process optimisation and automation is to execute tasks in support of human activity, or to relieve humans from having to perform business processes directly, thereby releasing valuable capacity for more creative work. In essence, a well-orchestrated AI automation deployment mimics humans and human activity: opening emails and responding to their contents with appropriate actions, or updating systems with the required data to bring a business process to a satisfactory conclusion.
It should be self-evident that humans do not possess the concept of a UI – other than good looks – and, on this principle, a fully functional AI-based automation solution cannot be demonstrated, evaluated or judged by the quality and attributes of a UI. It should instead be judged by the quality of its intended business outcome: did it do what was asked, without error? It should also be judged by its speed, cost and security of execution, in the same way that we would judge how well a human has executed their tasks – which, hopefully, does not involve or reflect on their appearance.
The fact that the UI does not play a significant role in an agentic automation platform makes communicating the capabilities and value of such solutions more complicated. There is still a need to demonstrate that value and those capabilities; we need to show how the platform can improve business outcomes in specific use cases by demonstrating how:
- They can be deployed fast, safely and cost effectively to execute a business process more timely and accurately than a human employee would.
- They can discover, synthesise and provide accurate information and knowledge on demand, quickly enough for humans to take meaningful and timely business action.
The added complexity comes from the fact that few organisations, on first contact with the possibilities of agentic AI, are able to identify easily which processes need improvement. Some of the confusion is also caused by the newness of the technology, which makes it difficult for companies to envision how it can be applied to business optimisation, leading to missed opportunities early on. This is similar to how difficult it was for people to imagine how their lives would revolve around a smartphone when the first Apple iPhone came out.
With our focus on helping customers “do AI properly”, we at AI-on-Cloud support them at every step of their AI adoption journey: from envisioning how AI can optimise their business, to understanding what it means to adopt TrueX for fast, secure, scalable, observable and cost-effective deployment.
Our support ranges from consulting advice during pre-sales and the early stages of engagement, helping customers envision how agentic AI can be applied to improve their business, through to Proof-of-Concept (PoC) deployments based on their specific use-cases, that make it real and help translate vision into business value – beyond simple platform UI demonstrations. This support is free and aimed at helping customers make critical decisions, while developing realistic and achievable business cases and AI adoption roadmaps in the process.
We are fully aware that simply demonstrating a good-looking UI is no longer enough. GenAI has changed the game, and we are fully committed to ensuring that our customers do not miss out on the opportunities its adoption presents.
