WHY 2026 MATTERS FOR AI BUILDERS
A NEW ERA OF AI-FIRST PRODUCTS
By 2026, winning AI products will be decided less by raw model power and more by how deeply AI is woven into user experience. The video brings together 100 AI leaders who explain how to think, design, and build today so your product is still relevant and differentiated in an AI-saturated world.
START FROM AI CAPABILITIES
NOT JUST FROM CLASSIC CUSTOMER NEEDS
Traditional product thinking starts with user needs and then finds technology to fit. In the AI era, you must also start from what AI can uniquely do. Understand each model’s strengths and weaknesses, then map those capabilities to real problems. Winning teams treat AI as a new raw material, not just another feature.
KNOW YOUR MODEL’S PERSONALITY
DIFFERENT MODELS, DIFFERENT SUPERPOWERS
Each AI model has its own “personality” and usage sweet spots. Builders should continually play with multiple models, test edge cases, and feel where each one shines or fails. This hands-on intuition helps you pick the right model for the right job instead of treating all LLMs as interchangeable commodities.
NEW INTERACTION PRIMITIVES
BEYOND PLAIN CHAT BOXES
Chat is a universal entry point but also a dead-end if used alone. New AI UX primitives are emerging: structured outputs like research reports, multimodal tools like AI video editors, and workflows where users guide the AI instead of just typing prompts. The real innovation space is inventing these new interaction patterns.
CHAT WITH ANYTHING, AT ANY SCALE
FROM SINGLE FILES TO ENTIRE KNOWLEDGE UNIVERSES
A key primitive is “chat with anything”: letting users talk to PDFs, data rooms, codebases, or entire knowledge graphs. Products that make this feel natural, controllable, and reliable will become default tools for research, analysis, and planning. The challenge is to keep interactions transparent, not mysterious.
SEMANTIC RESIZING & REMIXING
SAME MEANING, DIFFERENT FORMS
Semantic resizing lets users compress or expand content without losing core meaning. Remixing allows style or format transfer across text, audio, video, and visuals. AI products that make it trivial to go from long to short, serious to playful, or article to script to slide deck will unlock huge creative leverage.
FORMAT TRANSLATION AS A DEFAULT
FROM DOCUMENTS TO MEDIA, WITH MINIMAL LOSS
Format translation is becoming a basic expectation: turning a blog into a video outline, a meeting transcript into action items, or a dataset into charts. The winners will preserve nuance and structure instead of producing shallow summaries. Good design keeps users in control of what gets translated and how.
AGENT-BASED MULTITASKING
AI THAT WORKS WHILE YOU DON’T
Agents promise persistent, asynchronous work: monitoring data, running experiments, or coordinating tasks across tools. The vision is “attention is all you need” applied to workflows: agents that keep paying attention at scales humans cannot. But this power only matters if users can understand, direct, and trust what agents do.
THE AGENT UX PROBLEM
WHERE DO USERS TALK TO THEIR AGENTS?
Today, most agents are invisible. They run in the background, but users don’t know where to inspect, pause, or redirect them. AI leaders highlight the need for clear “lobbies” or control rooms where users can see all their agents, their tasks, status, and logs. Without this, agentic products will feel scary or opaque.
HUMANIZING AI WITH CHARACTERS
THE SPARK ‘MAGIC DOG’ EXAMPLE
Spark, a ‘magic dog’ AI character, shows how personality and metaphor can make AI more approachable. Instead of a cold tool, users interact with a playful companion. Well-designed characters can reduce anxiety, foster trust, and make experimentation feel safe. But the character must support real value, not hide bad behavior.
AI THAT MAKES YOU FEEL SOMETHING
EMOTION IS PART OF UX, NOT A DECORATION
Great AI UX is not just accurate; it is emotionally intelligent. It helps people feel understood, capable, and respected. Leaders stress that ‘magic’ moments come from collaboration, creativity, and kindness built into the product. The emotional tone of AI responses can be as important as their factual correctness.
SEEING BEYOND THE PROMPT
USER INTENT IS DEEPER THAN THEIR QUESTION
Users often ask shallow questions, but their real needs are deeper: clarity, strategy, emotional reassurance, or exploration. AI should act as a thought partner, helping users define the problem, explore alternatives, and see trade-offs. This means designing flows that go beyond one-shot answers into real dialogues.
NON-LINEAR PROBLEM SOLVING
DIVERGE, EXPLORE, PRUNE, CONVERGE
Human problem solving is nonlinear. We branch into options, compare them, discard many, and then converge. Most chatbots force a straight line. Future AI experiences must support branching conversations, saved paths, comparisons, and ‘what if’ explorations. Builders should design interfaces that make this branching visible and manageable.
TRUST BEFORE FEATURES
SOLVE REAL PROBLEMS, DON’T JUST ADD AI
AI should enhance the core value users already care about. Grammarly is a strong example: it helps people communicate better even before they start writing, quietly guiding them to clearer outcomes. Adding AI just to tick a box damages trust. The bar is: does this AI feature make the main job easier, safer, or faster?
AI AS COMMODITY, UX AS EDGE
WHEN EVERYONE HAS MODELS, EXPERIENCE WINS
Foundation models will be accessible to nearly everyone, like electricity or cloud storage. What will differentiate products is not access to AI, but how safely, elegantly, and powerfully they wrap AI into workflows. UX becomes the ergonomics of AI: making powerful capabilities feel natural, intuitive, and hard to give up.
STUDYING PROMPTS AND OUTCOMES
PROMPT LOGS AS UX RESEARCH GOLDMINE
User prompts and conversation histories are a new form of user research. They reveal where people struggle, where the product misaligns with their intent, and where new features should emerge. Teams that respectfully analyze this data, with strong privacy protections, will iterate faster toward genuinely helpful AI behavior.
ETHICS AND PRIVACY AS DESIGN CONSTRAINTS
AMPLIFYING GOOD WITHOUT AMPLIFYING HARM
AI amplifies outcomes: productive and harmful. Responsible builders must bake privacy, fairness, and alignment into the core product, not as afterthoughts. This includes transparent data usage, clear failure modes, and guardrails against bias or manipulation. Ethical design becomes a competitive advantage, not just compliance.
DESIGNING FOR SOCIETY, NOT JUST USERS
DOWNSTREAM EFFECTS OF AI PRODUCTS
Every AI product shapes behavior at scale: how people learn, work, and relate. Builders are urged to think beyond ‘engagement’ metrics and consider societal impact: concentration of power, misinformation, mental health, and economic shifts. Good design leaves room for exploration, agency, and long-term human development.
PREPARING THE NEXT GENERATION
KIDS GROWING UP WITH AI THOUGHT PARTNERS
Children today will treat AI as a normal collaborator: a tutor, coach, and brainstorming buddy. This democratizes access to knowledge and opportunity across countries and income levels. Education systems and product designers need to assume an AI-augmented baseline and design for curiosity, critical thinking, and ethical use.
EXPERIENCE, TRUST, AND MAGIC
WHAT ACTUALLY LASTS IN AN AI PRODUCT
Capabilities will keep leapfrogging, but what sticks is experience: how trusted, effortless, and ‘magical’ the product feels. The best AI tools anticipate needs, reduce frictions users didn’t have words for, and create moments where people say, ‘I can’t go back.’ This is where durable product moats are built.
RIDE THE WAVES OF AI INNOVATION
CONTINUOUS LEARNING AS A PRODUCT SKILL
AI will evolve in waves: new models, modalities, and regulations. Successful teams learn how to surf those waves, not fight them. That means fast experimentation, disciplined shipping, and building organizational muscles that can adapt UX and product strategy whenever the underlying technology shifts.
PRACTICAL MOVES FOR BUILDERS NOW
CONCRETE NEXT STEPS FROM AI LEADERS
Key advice: actively play with multiple AI models; map model capabilities to real user problems; design flows for non-linear exploration; invent new interaction paradigms beyond chat; embed transparency and kindness into every response; think about privacy and societal impact from day one; and use shipping as a way to learn, not just launch.
THINK OF AI AS A NEW MATERIAL
MASTERY COMES FROM HANDS-ON CRAFT
AI is compared to a new construction material or a new medium, like film or plastic when they first emerged. The only way to master it is to build with it, break it, and understand its constraints. Builders who treat AI as a craft to be honed will discover novel products that others cannot easily copy.
QUOTE BOARD – UX AND POWER
MEMORABLE LINES, PART 1
“A powerful AI model with poor UX is like a heavy-duty power drill with a terrible handle.”
“We need to help people before they even know what to ask.”
“People adopt tools that solve problems, not technology for technology’s sake.”
QUOTE BOARD – AGENTS AND EXPERIENCE
MEMORABLE LINES, PART 2
“Chat is both universal and kind of a dead-end for user experiences.”
“Attention is all you need: agents multitasking forever at expanding scales.”
“UX is the ergonomics of artificial intelligence.”
“The winners of the AI race will be determined by great user experience.”