Hello, Operator: OpenAI has launched Operator, the company’s first foray into agentic AI, the use of AI "agents" to take control of a web browser to independently carry out a range of tasks — from managing mundane data collection activities to booking travel.

Shared experiences: This agentic evolution has inevitably sparked debate about the future of CX under a new paradigm where man and machine share the cyber steering wheel. Businesses will need to design experiences that prioritize seamless collaboration with AI "visitors" alongside human users, and solve for the needs of both.

AI’s third wave: The arrival of agentic AI has been described by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff as a step-change technology. "First came predictive models that analyze data. Next came generative AI, driven by deep-learning models like ChatGPT. Now, we are experiencing a third wave — one defined by intelligent agents that can autonomously handle complex tasks."

Agents get priority: But if our new agentic friends are to be given the capability to go about their autonomous work effectively, designers will need to rethink their fundamental approach to CX as it pertains to UX. The pending influx of the virtual task-doers will eventually usher in an era where designers will need to consider AI agents, not humans, as the primary users of technology and account for things like:

• Ensuring content is clearly structured in a way that allows sites to be parsed by both human and non-human visitors.

• Implementing hybrid navigation systems, with traditional visual menus for humans alongside sitemaps and APIs for agents needing to retrieve hierarchical content programmatically.

New thinking: Tools like Operator will necessitate the creation of interfaces and experiences that facilitate seamless interaction between humans and AI, while ensuring clarity, trust, and ethical considerations in these interactions. As the likes of Operator force us to shake up our design priorities, we need to have some hard discussions about how we account for complexity, ethics, user autonomy, and collaboration.