Every roadmap has a chat box on it. Fewer have an answer for who it’s for.

UXAIDesign Where to draw the line before AI reaches professional users

Six questions to ask for whether a conversational layer will speed experts up or quietly put a keyboard between them and the work they already know.

Patrick Neeman

12 min read3 days ago

Nearly every B2B application I’ve seen has a chat box on it. Sometimes a sidebar, sometimes a rebuild where the prompt becomes the front door.

The feature is usually well designed and has an element of sparkly craft in it, because that’s how we are defining craft in AI now, right?

The question underneath it — who is this for, and what were they doing thirty seconds ago, how long have they been doing it in their career — usually goes unanswered.

That question matters more in professional applications than anywhere else, because these users aren’t visitors, they expert users in very specific domains; they have spent decades learning their domain and their software.

I’ve spend…