I'm starting to shudder every time I hear this phrase, "we need to take customers on a journey".
It nearly always comes up in conversation:
It nearly always comes up in conversation:
- Phase one: pepper some automation suggestions throughout the product's UI
- Phase two: ??
- Phase three: maybe, one day, an agent will tackle the actual whole business workflow, end-to-end
Instead, look at what "the journey" currently contains: endless probabilistic versus deterministic discussions that make people sound smart; what a confidence score means; what an MCP server is; when to trust the output and when to go behind it and check.
That's selling technology first!
In my view, all of it belongs under the bonnet. Documented and inspectable sure but there only for the day someone gets curious.
No one buying a car gets a walkthrough on two-stroke versus four-stroke versus rotary first. It matters a bit to car/engine/mechanical nerds. I doubt it's anywhere near the top 100 priorities of anyone buying a car to take the family out for a Sunday drive through the country-side.
If you think your customers have to understand how this incredible new thing works to get value from it, you're selling technology first.
But it's "easy" to fix...
It starts by mustering the courage to go back to the drawing board. How to hide the power behind an interface that's obvious on first use. The barrier to adoption is the user experience, not the technology. Designing it around transparency, checks and steering: what the agent is doing, actions to redirect it, where it stops and asks because someone is accountable for that step.
Then make it carry the whole workflow. Which systems it has to reach beyond your own app? What happens when a step fails halfway? What are the review points and who owns them.
Every product has a "job to be done". Somewhere along the way we got into the habit of scoping them down to a small part of that job. But now the opportunity and the work worth doing is very much on orchestrating the whole thing.
But it's "easy" to fix...
It starts by mustering the courage to go back to the drawing board. How to hide the power behind an interface that's obvious on first use. The barrier to adoption is the user experience, not the technology. Designing it around transparency, checks and steering: what the agent is doing, actions to redirect it, where it stops and asks because someone is accountable for that step.
Then make it carry the whole workflow. Which systems it has to reach beyond your own app? What happens when a step fails halfway? What are the review points and who owns them.
Every product has a "job to be done". Somewhere along the way we got into the habit of scoping them down to a small part of that job. But now the opportunity and the work worth doing is very much on orchestrating the whole thing.