Evgeny Grigul is the cofounder of Virto Commerce, a B2B-first e-commerce innovation platform for enterprises.
The user interface (UI) is one of the key mechanisms of differentiation and competition through which business software acquires and retains its market niche. This is especially true for mass-market business software for small and medium businesses.
In a broad sense, a classic UI includes a set of attractive images, fields and buttons, as well as combinations of scenarios that allow employees to complete specific tasks with maximum efficiency. Business software vendors are striving to offer better user interfaces and more enriched scenarios to attract a larger customer base. At the same time, vendors with a wide customer base are somewhat shielded from competition due to the user adoption effect, which is driven by the tendency of users to resist switching from a familiar interface to an unfamiliar one.
However, everything could dramatically change with the development of AI. Traditional graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are being replaced with adaptive UIs that make the “adoption effect” obsolete. The new market configuration will lead to the disappearance of some types of business software in the form we’re accustomed to seeing them in.
We see increasingly active attempts to integrate various AI assistants into our work. The traditional GUI (screens, fields and buttons) is being replaced by a conversational format that moves further away from any standards. Although we still see some limitations (prompt-writing rules), the dynamics are obvious. The most advanced vendors have already begun to include elements of AI user interfaces (AIUIs) in their applications.
How will the situation develop?
It can be confidently said that a new class of vendors will emerge, focusing exclusively on developing AI assistants for business tasks. This means that an AI assistant layer will wedge itself between the user and business apps, fully controlling the user experience by receiving tasks from users, breaking them down into sub-tasks and carrying out necessary actions in business applications.
At the same time, most business software vendors don’t have sufficient resources to create AI interfaces independently. This will be the domain of specialized companies focusing on AI assistants.
How will business software change in the new AIUI paradigm?
First, traditional business apps will lose their individuality, becoming merely data processing engines behind the AI assistant. This will undermine customer loyalty. Users will stop thinking about what’s behind the AI assistant, like few people think about who manufactured the servers sitting somewhere in a cloud provider’s data center.
Second, business application interfaces will change dramatically. The need to invest in the development and support of a nice-looking and user-friendly GUI will disappear, as AI assistants are unlikely to evaluate them. At the same time, it will become mandatory for business apps to provide well-structured APIs to ensure seamless interaction with the AI assistant. Instead of providing a collection of complex scenarios with rigid boundaries, AI assistants will work with atomic functions, which can “assemble” into the necessary scenarios to solve the tasks set by users.
Third, for users, the boundaries between different types of business applications will blur. As AI assistants mature, users will no longer focus on which system stores client information—whether it’s a CRM, a B2B e-commerce platform or an ERP system. AI assistants will be assigned tasks and will handle them by retrieving and transferring data across systems as needed.
What does this mean for software vendors?
The loss of access to the end user and the transformation into a commodity will lead to substantial changes in the market for business applications. The clients of producers of various systems, such as CRMs and ERPs, will no longer be hundreds of thousands of small- and medium-sized companies but rather just a handful of successful AI assistant providers, each of which will carefully select one or two technological partners in each segment. The main requirements for partnering technology will be flexibility, scalability and well-structured APIs—qualities that will allow AI assistants to effectively process millions of transactions daily within these systems.
At the same time, vendors who have invested heavily in usability and marketing at the expense of architectural excellence are unlikely to find their place in the new world. They’ll likely be acquired by new players primarily for customer base acquisition.
The situation described above won’t fully materialize in the next two to three years, but the prerequisites for it are already there. Prominent technologies like ChatGPT still seem unable to provide complete AIUI functionality, but more and more components are emerging that will eventually come together to form the necessary configuration. We’re constantly experimenting with AI functions in digital commerce and observing that the speed of changes is growing.
The picture outlined above is relevant for everyone involved, directly or indirectly, in the creation and development of business software.
• It’s important to carefully consider whether it’s worth investing in the creation of yet another business software if it isn’t focused on AIUI.
• Vendors developing business software should think about how ready their solutions are for the AIUI revolution and begin considering their survival strategy in the new reality.
• Employees who assume their experience with specific business software is a key skill should be prepared that they’ll need to grow other competencies, as software knowledge will no longer be an advantage in the AIUI paradigm.
AI promises to change the world around us, and we all need to reflect on how this will affect the many aspects of our daily lives.
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