For decades, digital products have asked users to learn how they work before they can get any value from them.
AI-native experiences — where the product’s behaviour is shaped by AI rather than a fixed, deterministic flow — have the potential to flip this on its head. Instead of teaching people how to use a system, these products learn from the user and adapt in return.
When this goes well, the result can be an experience that feels more intelligent, more responsive and more personal than anything we’ve been able to design before.
In this article, we reflected on recent client work where we’ve been seeing these changes firsthand, and distilled them into six shifts:
- Users learn the system → the system learns the user
- Static brand voice → dynamic personality
- Pre-determined flows → generative experiences
- Manual control → background intelligence
- Single → multi-modality
- Hardcoded logic → prompt-driven behaviour
To bring these shifts to life, we created six interactive storyboards that show how they play out in the domains we work in most often.
You'll find the first of these below. This one explores Shift 1 and what happens when we move from the dominant pattern today, where users must learn how to operate a new product, to an AI-native world where the system learns the user and adapts around them.
You can view the storyboard as an interactive carousel below, or download it as a PDF.
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