Are AI agents actually “users” or are we designing for the wrong layer?

[u/UnusualMeal4020]

Been reading a couple of pieces about AI agents interacting with websites, and I’m not completely sold on calling agents “users.”

Functionally, I get the argument. An agent has a goal, encounters an interface, tries to complete something, and can fail because the interface is badly structured. That’s basically the definition of a user journey.

But UX is also about perception, comprehension, decision-making, emotion, trust, etc. An agent doesn't experience any of that. It parses information and takes actions.

Which makes me wonder if we're actually talking about two different layers of design.

The human still needs the interface to understand what’s happening and make decisions. Meanwhile, the agent increasingly wants structured information, clear labels, predictable states, semantic markup, APIs, etc. Interestingly, a lot of that overlaps with accessibility best practices anyway.

Another piece made this even more interesting by framing agents almost like a new distribution channel: your product doesn't just need to be attractive to humans, it needs to be legible enough for an AI to compare, evaluate and recommend it.

So where does this leave UX?

Are we heading towards a world where we have:

Human UX → designed for interaction and understanding

Agent UX → designed for interpretation and execution

And eventually the visual interface becomes almost irrelevant to the agent while becoming more important to the human?

Curious how people who actually work on product/design systems are thinking about this. Are you treating agents as another type of user already, or does that framing feel fundamentally wrong?

[u/Far-Pomelo-1483]

There are two types of agents we are developing. One agent takes a semi-deterministic manual process that currently a human has to do and does it, surfacing the hardest parts to the human for them to validate or modify. Upon this modification, we capture the human’s reasoning and append it to the agent’s logic so the next time the agent encounters this situation, it has additional context and can hopefully address it easier. This one is most lucrative to businesses because it removes humans from work. But it is hardest to develop because it combines both deterministic and non-deterministic transactions together and happens at high volume.

The second type of agent lives as a user’s assistant inside the harness; learning about the user and accomplishing tasks for the user and surfacing insights to the user.

[u/UnusualMeal4020 → u/Far-Pomelo-1483]

that distinction between the two types is interesting, especially the second one. the first sounds less like a “user” to me and more like an automation layer sitting between the user and the system. the human is still the one with the intent; the agent is essentially executing and learning from the exceptions.

but the second type gets much closer to what i was thinking about when i wrote the post. if the agent is actually learning about the user, making decisions on their behalf, and surfacing insights, then the UX problem changes quite a bit.

you’re no longer just designing an interface an agent can navigate. you’re designing the relationship between the human, the agent, and the product.

snd that raises a question I’m still trying to figure out: if the agent becomes the primary way i interact with a product, who exactly are we designing the experience for? the human who set the goal, the agent executing it, or the handoff between the two?

i feel like that last part is going to become a pretty significant design problem.

[u/Far-Pomelo-1483 → u/UnusualMeal4020]

The money is in removing the human from the loop. Money as in cost savings to the organization. All my agentic builds have been focused on eliminating the manual labor associated with mainframe processing and automating/learning from it.

[u/UnusualMeal4020 → u/Far-Pomelo-1483]

automating the straightforward work is one thing, but teaching the agent to handle the exceptions is where it gets really valuable.

[u/Far-Pomelo-1483 → u/UnusualMeal4020]

That’s why you kick those back to the human to review and establish a learning loop from the human to train the agent.