Rosenverse
AI of the now: Designing for Agents

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.

AI of the now: Designing for Agents

Wednesday, July 31, 2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Share the love for this talk
AI of the now: Designing for Agents
Speakers: Christopher Noessel
Link:

Summary

AI agents are on the rise: people are talking about them, getting excited, and putting infrastructure into place to support them. You may be asked to design agents soon—or you may want to think through your product as an agent in order to get a leg up on your competition. What’s different about designing for agents? Are you ready? Rosenfeld author Christopher Noessel published Designing Agentive Technology back in 2017, and it seems like the world is just now catching up. Join Chris as he recaps the core ideas from that book, how agents have evolved since publication, and what it all might mean since the explosion of generative AI. Takeaways include… What is an agent? How do agents differ and complement other modes of interaction? Why are people getting excited about it now? What does generative AI bring to the agentive table?

Key Insights

  • Agents act on behalf of principals, whether humans, animals, or machines, performing tasks with variable human attention involvement.

  • Agentive technology operates largely outside the user's attention, unlike assistants that require active engagement.

  • Chris identified 27 unique agent use cases including setup, monitoring, handoff, and disengagement.

  • There are four modes of agency: manual, assistant, automation, and agentive, depending on who performs the work.

  • Agentive systems don’t require an agentic backend, and agentic backends can exist without agentive front-ends.

  • Recent AI advances use an 'agentic backend' architecture where a large language model orchestrates specialized agents for complex tasks.

  • Design challenges include enabling user control over agent plans, forbidding specific data sources, and handling persistent queries.

  • AI risks include deskilling users, overreliance on AI output, and ethical concerns from hidden, biased, or commercialized agentic actions.

  • Agents hold huge value potential by performing work outside users’ limited attention, making them a strong business opportunity.

  • Despite a rise in AI backend engineering, design is essential to maintain usefulness and address human-AI interaction complexities.

Notable Quotes

"An agent is anything that displays agency, the ability to take actions and choose which actions to take."

"I don’t want a surgeon to tap me on the shoulder and ask where to put the incision; that’s their expertise."

"My Roomba vacuums while I’m at work. It does its work out of my attention."

"We’ve been dealing with assistance since spellcheckers in the 1970s evolved to grammar checkers and beyond."

"The user might want to see that plan in advance and make sure they’re okay with how it’s going to go about it."

"Large language models sometimes hallucinate, so agentic backends assign sub-tasks to specialized expert agents."

"Agents do work outside the user's attention, freeing up their limited time for other activities."

"We risk deskilling users and overreliance, where people rubber stamp AI output without critical thought."

"Agentic systems could be hidden, allowing corporations to push self-interested biases undetected."

"AI should augment humans, not replace them, especially given societal disparities between deep and fast thinkers."

Ask the Rosenbot
Jacqui Frey
Scale is Social Work
2020 • DesignOps Community
Gina Mendolia
Therapists, Coaches, and Grandmas: Techniques for Service Design in Complex Systems
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
Erika Flowers
AI-Readiness: Preparing NASA for a Data-Driven, Agile Future
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Lada Gorlenko
Theme 3: Introduction
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Caroline Jarrett
Have fun with statistics?
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Nora Tejeda
Scaling Design Capabilities at BBVA Through a Self-service Design Model
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Cassandra Piester
Developing and Deploying Your Design Operations Strategy
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Shipra Kayan
How we Built a VoC (Voice of the Customer) Practice at Upwork from the Ground Up
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Reginé Gilbert
Asking the Right Questions: Life, Hope and Moving Forward During the Pandemic
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Tracy McGoldrick
IBM User Experience Program—The What, Why and How
2021 • Advancing Research Community
Eniola Oluwole
Lessons From the DesignOps Journey of the World's Largest Travel Site
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Dan Ward
Failure Friday #1 with Dan Ward
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Emily Lessard
RFPs Without Tears: Writing Inclusive RFPS that Don't Scare Away Talent
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Steve Krug
Don’t Make Me Think 3.0: What Endures and What Evolves in UX
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold
Meaghan Waters
Lack of Product Thinking will Doom Your Legacy Modernization
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold

More Videos

Alexandra Schmidt

"The current design education system doesn't always prepare designers for the complexity of enterprise challenges."

Alexandra Schmidt

Enterprise UX Playbook

December 1, 2022

Jen Crim

"We have maintained that freshness and acceptance of new ideas while growing rapidly."

Jen Crim Jess Quittner Saritha Kattekola Alex Karr Gurbani Pahwa

Culture, DIBS & Recruiting

June 11, 2021

Christian Crumlish

"If you’re a product manager, you don’t do very much design work anymore; you care about it but step away from the Figma."

Christian Crumlish

AMA with Christian Crumlish, author of Product Management for UX People

March 24, 2022

Libby Maurer

"If diversity is being asked to the party, inclusion is being asked to dance, and belonging is actually dancing with everyone else."

Libby Maurer

Treating Diversity & Inclusion in Hiring as a Design Problem

December 5, 2019

Ali Jeffery

"When we engage people in the planning process, they take ownership of their city."

Ali Jeffery Sheri Chudow

How DesignOps Helped Enable Wall Street to Work Remotely

October 22, 2020

Daniel Gloyd

"Daniel Day-Lewis went so far as to suffer three broken ribs immersing in his role for My Left Foot."

Daniel Gloyd

Designing From the Inside Out: How Method Acting Can Inspire Design Research

February 12, 2026

Kristin Skinner

"The future of education lies in collaboration and adaptation."

Kristin Skinner

Five Years of DesignOps

September 29, 2021

Johanna Kollmann

"Confirmation bias is when we ignore or explain away data that doesn’t support what we already believe - Nina Belk."

Johanna Kollmann

Insights-Driven Product Strategy: Get your Research to Count

December 6, 2022

David Sternberg

"Human behavior is anything but linear, rational, or predictable."

David Sternberg

Uncovering the hidden forces shaping user behavior

July 17, 2025