Om Prakash, writing for UX Collective, argues that chat should handle ambiguous intent rather than replace graphical interfaces:

This is a distinction Erika Hall draws precisely in Conversational Design (A Book Apart, 2018) — arguably the sharpest book written on this subject. Hall argues that conversation is the right design choice only when the system needs to negotiate meaning with the user. When the user already knows what they want — “add to cart,” “filter by price,” “submit the form” — conversation is overhead. Structure is faster, more accurate, and less exhausting. Conversation earns its place only when intent is genuinely ambiguous: when the user is exploring, when their goal is fuzzy, when they need the system to meet them partway.

This framework changes how you evaluate chat implementations in the wild. The products that figured it out early didn’t go all-in on chat. They built hybrid interfaces , structured UI for known, predictable tasks; conversational AI for open-ended, exploratory ones.

For designers, the practical choice comes before any screen or prompt: how clear is the user’s intent?

Choosing the interaction mode becomes more consequential when software can act. A form submission can usually be corrected; an agent may send an email or book a flight before the user realizes it misunderstood. Prakash shifts from intent to oversight:

The UX problem this creates is the most interesting one in our field right now: how do you design an interface for an agent that doesn’t need an interface to do its job, but whose users absolutely need one to trust it?

Ben Shneiderman, in Human-Centered AI (MIT Press, 2022), has been asking a version of this question for years. He argues that the dominant framing of AI as an autonomous agent replacing human judgment is both technically premature and ethically dangerous — and proposes instead a framework of high human control combined with high automation. Not one at the expense of the other. The goal is not to minimize human involvement; it’s to make human oversight legible, accessible, and non-burdensome. Shneiderman’s model is the right north star for agentic UX: not autonomy versus control, but autonomy with control — designed into the system from the start.

This is the transparency paradox of agentic design. An agent that operates silently is efficient and terrifying. An agent that narrates every action is trustworthy and exhausting. The design challenge is finding the right level of visibility — enough that users feel in control, not so much that they’re overwhelmed by a stream of system-generated activity logs.