When AI Does What We Asked but Misses the Point, UX Must Adapt

Designing for Delegated Decisions

This piece looks at a shift that many product teams are only beginning to feel: AI is moving from answering questions to carrying out multi-step tasks on our behalf. The author uses a simple hotel booking and an inbox clean-up to show how an agent can follow an instruction to the letter and still miss what the person actually meant. A cheap hotel far from the city centre is technically correct and practically useless. The article also points out that checking an agent's work can become its own job, which undermines the promise of saving time.

From there the author proposes five design considerations: show the plan before acting, let users choose how much autonomy to grant, make actions and changes visible, make mistakes easy to undo, and have the agent ask a good question when the right choice is unclear. For brand builders, the thread running through these points is trust, and trust is shaped by interface decisions. Designers, product owners and strategists working on assistants, commerce flows or any service that will soon act for customers should read it. It is a useful framing for deciding where automation belongs and where it should pause.