Most product teams adding AI start by building a new surface for it. A custom panel. A chat sidebar. A dedicated AI workspace. Alexandra Vasquez, writing for Bootcamp, describes her team making exactly that mistake:
We built a custom AI panel with its own navigation, input styles, and button treatments. It looked “futuristic” in the prototype. In user testing, people kept asking where things were and how to get back to their actual work. We had created a separate product inside our product.
The fix was simple: they deleted the panel and put agent actions in the same menus, modals, and toolbars people already used. Slack does this with its /command structure. Notion uses the same slash menu for manual and AI actions. The pattern is existing UI that happens to be smarter.
Vasquez argues most “AI failures” are actually system failures that agents expose at scale:
Designing for agents means treating information architecture and workflows as foundational. Before building an agent, audit your system’s foundations: Are labels consistent? Do hierarchies make sense? Can a new team member navigate workflows without constant help? If humans struggle, agents will fail faster and at scale. Fix the system first.
She’s right. And there’s a more radical version of this: agents don’t need human UI at all. As long as the APIs are available, an agent can complete tasks without ever touching a button or reading a screen. The interface is for the human, not the machine.
But that’s exactly the problem. If the agent bypasses the interface, the human’s ability to express intent and verify output becomes the whole game. Intent has to be crystal clear. Feedback has to be immediate and legible. And there’s a huge amount of trust to earn before anyone is comfortable letting an agent operate in the background on their behalf. Vasquez lands here too:
The AI model is the last thing we discuss, not the first. These are product decisions, and designers have outsized influence here.
The model is the least interesting part. The interesting part is designing the trust.
