The Future Of Innovation In Service Design

Work on designing AI-first assistant and agent experiences has been eye opening. AI UX is both fundamentally the same and widely different, especially for vertical use cases. There are clear and emerging patterns that will likely continue to scale: 1. Comfort will start with proactive intelligence and hyper personalization. The biggest expectation customers have of AI is that it’s smart and it knows them based on their data. Personalization will become a key entry point where a recommendation kicks off a “thread” of inquiry. Personalization should only get better with “memory”. Imagine a pattern where an assistant or an agent notifies you of an anamoly, advice that’s specific to your business, or an area to dig deeper into relative to peers. 2. There are two clear sets of UX patterns that will emerge: assistant-like experiences and transformative experiences. Assistant-like experiences will sound familiar by now. Agents will complete a task partially either based on input or automation and the user confirms their action. You see this today with experiences like deep search. Transformative experiences will often start by human request and will then become background experiences that are long running. Transformative experiences, in particular, will require associated patterns like audit trails, failure notifications, etc. 3. We will start designing for agents as much as we design for humans. Modularity and building in smaller chunks becomes even more important. With architecture like MCP, the way you think of the world in smaller tools becomes a default. Understanding the human JTBD will remain core but you’ll end up building experiences in pieces to enable agents to pick and choose what parts to execute in what permutation of user asks. 4. It’ll become even more important to design and document existing standard operating procedures. One way to think about this is a more enhanced more articulated version of a customer journey. You need to teach agents the way not just what you know. Service design will become an even more important field. 5. There will be even less tolerance for complexity. Anything that feels like paperwork, extra clicks, or filler copy will be unacceptable; the new baseline is instant, crystal‑clear, outcome‑focused guidance. No experience, no input, no setting should start from zero. Just to name a few. The underlying piece is that this will all depend on the culture design teams, in particular, embrace as part of this transition. What I often hear is that design teams are already leading the way in adoption of AI. The role of Design in a world where prototyping is far more rapid and tools evolve so quickly will become even more important. It’ll change in many ways (some of it is by going back to basics) but will remain super important nonetheless. Most of the above will sound familiar on the surface but there’s so much that changes in the details of how we work. Exciting times.

Why are we still mapping customer journeys like it’s 2005? For years, companies have been designing customer journeys with guesswork, gut feelings, and painfully slow research processes. Want to know what’s actually broken in your customer experience? Too bad. You’ll need six months, a pile of surveys no one wants to fill out, and a team of consultants charging you by the hour. That era is over. AI is blowing up the old way of doing customer research and service design and the companies that don’t get on board will be stuck running customer experience on vibes while competitors sprint ahead. 1. AI eliminates guesswork. No more relying on a handful of interviews and assumptions to map customer journeys. AI can scan thousands of data points including things like customer reviews, call transcripts, surveys, operational logs, etc. and instantly surface what’s actually frustrating your customers. It finds patterns in minutes that would take humans weeks to identify. 2. It ranks your problems for you. Every company has a mountain of issues, but which ones are actually costing you money? AI doesn’t just highlight pain points. It tells you which ones are hitting your bottom line the hardest so you can fix the real problems first. 3. Months of research now happens in days. Companies waste absurd amounts of time diagnosing problems instead of ACTUALLY solving them. AI shortcuts this entire process, getting you straight to the action instead of drowning in decks/slides/docs. 4. You can iterate faster than ever. Instead of launching a massive change and praying it works, AI lets you test tweaks in real time, track sentiment shifts, and refine as you go. No more waiting months to see if your fix actually fixed anything. 5. It scales service design and customer research in a way humans simply can’t. A single team might be responsible for millions of customer interactions. AI gives them the firepower of an entire research division for a fraction of the cost. Most companies are still designing customer experiences in the dark. AI is flipping tables on that. You can either embrace it and create seamless, high-impact experiences.. or keep throwing darts and hope something sticks 😬 The future of service design and customer experience is AI-driven, fast, and based on data instead of assumptions. Onward & upward 🤘

AI agents will transform service design by becoming active participants in service delivery (not just tools). We'll likely see two types emerge: 🤖 Personal AI assistants >> They'll function like your personal assistant, coordinating tasks across services and organizations >> They'll handle everything from scheduling medical appointments to managing investments >> IMO (very early), password managers and cybersecurity companies are best positioned to enter this market - trust, security, and data management are the major hurdles 🏢 Organization AI agents >> They'll gradually augment or replace traditional support staff >> They'll interact directly with users' personal AI assistants >> They'll handle internal operations like IT support, scheduling, and compliance When AI assistants start talking to other AI agents, the rules of competition change completely. Traditional UX touchpoints (beautiful apps, seamless websites) might matter less than: >> How well your systems play with AI >> The quality of your data >> Whether users trust your AI I've heard compelling arguments on both sides about which marketplace will develop first (this is significant because it will dictate the landscape, requirements, and user expectations). Read more in my article with Pablo Fernandez Vallejo: https://lnkd.in/eRFd6uvT #ServiceDesign #AI #UX #DesignThinking Nielsen Norman Group