Digital Impacts
How Generative AI is reshaping search, interfaces, agentic systems, and the cross-cutting themes that digital professionals must design for.
The GenAI enter people’s lives through three paths, with very different levels of maturity:
- AI-mediated search (AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity) — the most widespread, reaching even those who have never opened a chatbot;
- Conversational chat (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude);
- Agentic AI, where the infrastructure accelerates while consumer adoption lags behind.
The three paths share four nodes — trust, understanding of the system, accessibility and, since this year, regulatory compliance — covered in the cross-cutting themes.
This section collects the evolution directions described in the workshop Shaped by AI — Phase 2: the impact on digital professions.
Search Becomes Conversation
Users no longer search: they express an intention and delegate selection, synthesis, and response to the system.
From intention to result: search based on intent, not keywords, and what it means for content producers.
Awareness and consideration move inside the chats: users arrive already oriented, often in the conversion phase.
The user gets exactly what they asked for, not what they did not know they wanted: lateral exposure to unsearched information is lost.
The Conversational Interface
Those who use ChatGPT daily begin to demand the same level of adaptability from any digital product, including those that are not chatbots.
The New Expectation of a Zero Learning Curve
The expectation grows that it is the interface that learns the user, without a learning phase and in their language.
Chat as the Universal Default Interface
From the expectation of a zero curve follows another: that chat is the standard mode for interacting with any service.
The User's Language Replaces the System's Taxonomy
The user expresses the need in their own words and expects the system to understand it.
From Form to Progressive Refinement
The user starts from an approximate idea and refines it through iterations. Tolerance for complex forms and long wizards declines.
The expectation that every system recognizes the user, does not start from zero, and adapts in real time. The experience-led design model.
Agentic AI: From Showing to Doing
The user expects the system to act, not just to show. Delegation, trust calibration, and making a traditional product usable by an agent.
The User Expects the System to Act, Not Just to Show
The user describes the desired result and delegates the orchestration: they define the output, they do not manipulate elements one by one.
Making a Traditional Product Usable by an Agent
Building an agent is a project; making your service agent-ready is maintenance work that concerns the products we already have in production.
Cross-Cutting Themes
Trust, AI literacy and calibration; the regulatory perimeter; accessibility and hybrid interfaces; empathy and social presence.
Trust, AI Literacy and Calibration
Users misunderstand GenAI in two opposite directions: overestimation and unjustified distrust. Calibration is built in degrees.
From 2026 compliance enters the design perimeter: disclosure, content marking, minors' consent, accessibility.
Accessibility and Hybrid Interfaces
Natural language opens some doors and closes others. The answer is not choosing between chat and GUI, but designing hybrid interfaces.
GenAI calibrate the tone, apologize, thank: a perception of social presence. Where does designed empathy end and relational manipulation begin?