Dan Saffer (00:05)
Welcome to AI and Design, where we explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the world of design. And I'm Dan Saffer, and we're faculty at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute,

Nik Martelaro (00:13)
I'm Nik Martelaro.

Each week we break down the latest AI developments, dive deep into topics that matter to designers, and talk with fascinating guests who are right at the intersection of these fields.

Dan Saffer (00:31)
And whether you're a designer working with AI or an AI practitioner who's interested in design, we're glad you're here. So on today's episode, we are going to be discussing. ⁓

Nik Martelaro (00:45)
Microsoft's Copilot Checkout, a new feature that lets US shoppers complete purchases directly inside of Copilot without ever leaving the chat window.

Dan Saffer (00:53)
Google's A2 UI, which stands for agent to user interface. It's an open source specification that allows AI agents to generate user interfaces on the fly.

Nik Martelaro (01:07)
And straight from CES, a holographic AI desk companion from Razer.

Dan Saffer (01:12)
And we'll wrap up today by doing our AI and design predictions for 2026. But first, let's get to this week's top AI and design stories, starting with Microsoft's Copilot Checkout.

Nik Martelaro (01:26)
So Dan, I saw this story and I thought as a first perspective, this is going to completely change how e-commerce and how designers of e-commerce sites maybe have to think about their strategies. Because if people are starting to use AI chatbots more and more, like Copilot, like ChatGBT, and we're starting to put the shopping experience in there and we're putting even the checkout experience,

What does that mean for the e-commerce user experience that have been so carefully crafted by many designers on their own products websites? What do you think about this?

Dan Saffer (01:58)
And I mean, not only just the designers that are doing it kind of the, smaller scale websites are kind of across the board. But I mean, these massive companies like Amazon, which has spent decades slowly refining that, that checkout process. So yeah, this is a huge shift, I think in UX design when it comes to e-commerce.

I don't even know how this is gonna work. I mean, I'm like, how do you start to do things like comparison shop? And am I gonna have to like describe everything very well? Or is it just a simple like, show me every razor and it's gonna go out and look across five different sites and bring me back.

what kind of razor it thinks I want. just, yeah, this is gonna be a huge shift. How do you even start to do this?

Nik Martelaro (02:55)
Yeah, you bring up a really interesting point here on this idea of like comparison shopping, because actually I'm reading here on the news, they're talking about brand agents. So the idea is it sounds like Microsoft is going to give teams sort of an ability to create a brand agent. So that's something that, as they say, speaks in your brand's voice and guides customers naturally from curiosity to purchase. So that seems pretty reasonable to me. And actually we have people who've been doing conversational

UX design and I can totally imagine that companies can tool up and designers can start thinking about what their brand agent is going to be. But just like you were saying, if I'm shopping for say a razor, am I getting Gillette's, brand agent immediately? And if I'm another razor company, am I getting beat out because Gillette's team has a better brand agent? Or are these AI systems, which again, the designers don't have control over co-pilot.

How are they going to start bringing up, recommending different products and bringing different brand agents in? Does someone have to have the experience all the way to saying, okay, now I want to buy a Gillette razor or I want to talk about Gillette razors and now I get a Gillette brand experience. So it's going to be really interesting to see how Copilot and I arguably how Microsoft starts allowing conversations to be, to lead people to certain products and then how certain brand agents get brought up.

Dan Saffer (04:13)
Yeah, and will it be something like Microsoft has a deal with Gillette and Ergo, gee, Gillette really is a really good razor and it's very highly, highly recommended. You know, is it going to be that? I mean, you can definitely see that with something like Google or Meta

or if this spreads to Amazon, which I'm sure eventually it will and where they paid for sponsored content or they paid for sponsored ads. I can't imagine that this thing is going to end up being a very neutral agent experience for you. How do you know when Gillette has a deal with you? I guess that's something that will have to be disclosed at some point.

Well, one would hope.

Nik Martelaro (04:58)
Yeah, I mean, I'm looking here and it actually says, for example, a customer might start with, what would be a good gift for my mom? And then says, the agent responds in your brand's voice. So from there, like a brand agent, a specific brand agent is gonna be brought up here. Now I could totally imagine a mix of brand agents coming up. So if you say, what's a great gift? You could imagine it saying, ⁓ there's these top five gifts for mothers everywhere. And maybe you even as a user say,

I'd like to hear more about that. And then I'm introduced to the brand agent. And that could be, for example, a little bit more equal for players. And that kind of mimics the pros, kind of what experience is right now. Like if I go into a chat bot now and say, Hey, what are some top gifts? It will probably give me a list of those things. And then I might ask questions about that. And so in that perspective, if you're imagining that the first experience is happening in the chat bot to sort of expose

customers to certain things. The moment I decide I want to talk about a certain product, that's when a brand agent gets pulled up. I mean, that could be a great experience. And the cool thing about that from a design perspective is now your UX team is going to have more control over that experience that the customer is having as opposed to just hoping that Microsoft or OpenAI or Google's chatbot is going to represent your brand well.

I see why they're doing this, I mean see why this could make sense, but it is gonna be interesting to see how certain products get uplifted, how do they get discovered.

Dan Saffer (06:24)
Mm-hmm and Then how are then how are they displayed our designers gonna have to make a new display for each one of? These platforms or is there gonna be a standardized? of thing or Which probably maybe leads us to our next topic? Which is

the Google A2 UI.

To generate these kind of rich and interactive user interfaces just on the fly. And so if this is adopted widely, this could be something where I'm just providing assets or I'm just providing a design system or components that then

The AI is just assembling on the fly for this based on the brand agent. Brand agent is such a weird thing. It's such a weird name for it. Does the article talk about brand agents brand being like Etsy or is it more like

brand agent as Gillette.

Currently it says there's retailers like Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, Etsy, and Shopify.

Nik Martelaro (07:32)
Yeah, I mean, think brand is brand in the way we kind of think about it. It's sort of at the company level. I mean, it's interesting. So I should say actually Etsy is a weird one because Etsy is a marketplace in and of itself. so every Etsy seller is an individual representative. So are they going to have any say over how the Etsy brand agent represents their products or is it

Dan Saffer (07:46)
Right.

Nik Martelaro (07:58)
simply in their case that it's the Etsy brand. Like for urban outfitters, anthropology, that makes more sense, right? That's sort of your standard branding and one agent can represent the entire company in this chat interaction. But yeah, Etsy's entries is an interesting one. I wonder what it's gonna be like and if that's going to mean that Etsy sellers have to provide information for a brand agent to be able to represent their product.

in a accurate and good way.

Dan Saffer (08:28)
I mean, is this going to be the end of Etsy? Or things like this where, because why would I, an individual seller, need an Etsy? Couldn't Copilot just go find my stuff? Or, I don't know. It seems, I can see why Shopify would be on here because they power payment.

But Etsy doesn't have its own payment engine.

Nik Martelaro (08:50)
when

Shopify also powers people's small business sites, Stripe. So having these as partners, arguably that's an interesting question, right? Do you need Etsy or do you need other marketplaces? Does the chatbot become a marketplace? And now you're designing for the chatbot marketplace as opposed for designing for other marketplaces or designing your own experience. I mean, my sense is

This is an addition. People are going to need to design their own in-house, fully controlled brand experience, fully controlled e-commerce experience. But now you've got to add this to the list of design work that you need to do. You've got to design now for this chat-based shopping experience where you're creating arguably this brand agent and the assets

that are going to work within a chat. I agree, I think this does lead really well to that second story on Google's A2 UI, which is, in chat interfaces, oftentimes language isn't enough, text isn't enough, and you just want sometimes a graphical interface. I think people have been thinking about this for a while, people have been exploring this, and yeah, to me, this story and this development from Google seems like, the first kind of big

push to try to maybe create a standard or create systems that would allow designers to really operate right now. You'd kind of have to build this yourself if you wanted to add this. And there are tools out there that let you do that. But I think by having a big player like Google do this, this is kind of them setting their mark is like, well, we want people to build on this. And arguably I can imagine that this is going to be something that we'll start seeing in the Gemini ecosystem.

Dan Saffer (10:30)
⁓ a hundred percent. I can definitely see this being used first in Gemini and then they're going to try to see who else can adopt it. Because you're right, this has been a dream of UI designers and HCI professionals, particularly at HCI for like decades. Just give me just enough interface to do the little thing that I want.

and customize it to me and tailor it to me and personalize it and then done. It's for me it was kind of crazy that they dropped this kind of at the very end of the year like ⁓ okay here's here's a thing that changes everything about design but

Have a good year everybody. So I think that this is a really interesting thing and I wonder how widely it's going to be adopted

You know last year people were definitely talking a lot about this people saying that there was going to be the end of user interface because the AI will just always be generating its own interface over and over depending on what you need and I am pretty skeptical about that that

it's gonna generate interfaces for us that it knows what we need I don't think we're there yet and I don't even know who will ever be there But I think this is an interesting experiment and an interesting step forward that I think will be Pretty cool if it gets widely adopted and it would solve some of these problems of

Do I have to design the AI fied version of this across? Meta Google Apple Microsoft open AI anthropa and the list goes on and on, because that would be. Really annoying.

Nik Martelaro (12:20)
Yeah, and I think from a design perspective too, know, again, how do you control as a designer the experience that people have? I mean, so much, think of a lot of what we do as designers is trying to craft an experience for people that we have a lot of control over, that we know what people, we know what they should expect. We know what's going to happen.

Dan Saffer (12:41)
We know the words. know, yeah, we know the color palette. We know all those things.

Nik Martelaro (12:46)
And I think designers are probably starting to get used to the idea that, yeah, I mean, can design conversations and I don't have full control over them, but I can sort of steer them in a certain way. think we're figuring that out. think designers are learning strategies to do that. And we're starting to see how that is, becoming more of a trend, but now, you know, pulling it into, into the user interface area, right? I think it's a big change. I I'm curious, you know, Dan, like, what are your thoughts on like, what is this going to look like?

As a designer, like what work are you gonna do to kind of create these things?

Dan Saffer (13:16)
so there's a big push right now that's all about how do you start to make your design system AI readable? And I'm wondering how much of this will be, whether it takes your AI.

readable components from your design system and starts to put these things together or if it's something like Google is it just using material design to piece together these user interfaces and you just have to include a lot of logic wrapped around that like hey this piece goes with that piece don't ever show this without that I don't know I think that's the big

That's the big missing question. I know Microsoft last year was experimenting with these things called like dynamic cards, I think is the name of them, where again, it was just kind of components that could be put together almost like Lego pieces in these kind of building blocks. And I wonder if it's gonna start looking something like that, where if you're...

Anthropology or Urban Outfares or whatever you hand, you know, here's our set of building blocks there's some kind of metadata wrapper around. Here's what it looks like when we show shirts and you have to ask these questions when you show shirts and so there needs to be a drop down that has

small, medium, extra large, you know, those kinds of things. Do you hand a whole bunch of rules over to the system?

Nik Martelaro (14:47)
Yeah, one of the things that you're making me think of is actually that this may be an additional aspect to our responsive design work, right? That basically we're going to move from desktop to mobile to now chat bot One thing I'm wondering is, does this cardify like the internet? Because what we're seeing here, if you actually

Dan Saffer (14:55)
yeah.

Nik Martelaro (15:09)
look at the pictures from the article, they show cards. I mean, it's a card interface and everything is a card. you know, I think that works well on mobile. I think there's been a lot of things where we are moving to sort of cards as a core component and then filling those cards. But I wonder if we're going to see things push much, much further, or is this the start of something and, you know, this is really going to get good enough that, no, you could be on full desktop.

Dan Saffer (15:15)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Nik Martelaro (15:36)
and we can design an entire user interface that isn't cards, it's using all kinds of components, it's got all kinds of different layout, is that going to be something that we're moving towards?

Dan Saffer (15:47)
Yeah, I guess we'll see I can pretty easily imagine that right? Well, you have well if your own desktop show these components if you're not have this or their components are just responsive as you're saying they just stretch and grow and hey use the big buttons if you're here or there.

let's move on and do our last News item

Those of you don't know the consumer electronics show is happening in Las Vegas or maybe it just wrapped up by the time you are listening to this and every year consumer electronics folks all gather in Las Vegas to show off their latest and greatest and of course last couple years there has been some AI

Powered items in here and I thought this one was was kind of interesting and silly which is that the the company Razor showed off a holographic AI desk companion and This it's a device that's in a It's a small tube that displays this holographic avatar

connects to your PC with a USB cable and it has a microphone and speaker and camera and so the little AI avatar can talk and listen to you and react to its surroundings. It's this little genie in a bottle kind of thing and you can choose different personas for it so you can have little anime characters or

can have something that seems more more realistic and I don't know I thought this was I thought this was kind of fun it's just this idea of like what are ways that people are trying to make these AI assistants more tangible

And I thought that was kind of a kind of interesting as we start thinking about what are some like

AI hardware that could come out because everything has been kind of AI in the background for the hardware. The AI is listening or it's on a pin or it's on, you know, but this is like an AI with a face sitting on your desk.

Nik Martelaro (17:53)
Yeah, I mean, I think that this is an interesting experiment in AI hardware and really in putting personas onto AI. mean, when you look at the sites, when you check out Project Ava from Razor, you can see that they've got a couple of different personas. Many of them are either kind of cartoon characters, but they're trying to be fully sort of human-like, except for they do have the one sort of

glowing orb, know, sci-fi assistant. And it'll be interesting to see, right? You know, if people get this, if they start using it, you know, what do they gravitate towards? Like there's something to be said, right? One of the interesting things about the embodiment aspect of it is that you can add all kinds of ⁓ physical gesture and that that can be part.

of the design of the experience, is something that you can kind of do, right, with sort of, you know, motion graphic design when you use these, you know, sort of the floating orb sci-fi, but it'll be really interesting to see, what people actually gravitate towards. I'll say this though, really also again, changes like as a designer of experiences, like if you're utilizing, say an AVA as a consumer, if you're utilizing it and then maybe asking the question of,

hey, what product should I buy? Could you help me find some gifts? And now do you have a brand agent that is sort of taking on the persona of these Razor personas? And now you have to mix the Razor persona with the brand agent to make sure it's giving you information. And now you've got sort of this, I don't know, is it like collaborative, like user experience? Or is it, does one, you know, take precedent over the other?

Because for example, yeah, I that's something now that really adds a lot of complication to things. So it'd be interesting to see how how designers start engaging with this. Are their experiences going to be sort of embodied by these agents or is Razor primarily focusing on sort of these agents do something else? But I imagine at some point they were gonna want to have those type of integrations.

Dan Saffer (19:51)
Right. I mean, if I've got this thing sitting here on my desk, why wouldn't I use it for the kinds of things that I would use Alexa for right now You could just ask it, hey, buy me the plane tickets or book a calendar invite with Bob or whatever it is.

Nik Martelaro (20:10)
Well, I can tell you, I want Clippy. I want Clippy on my desk all the time. That's what I want to see. So yeah, we'll see. yeah, I mean, ultimately I do think this is an interesting exploration of hardware enabled AI and sort of getting AI out of your phone, out of your computer screen and actually into the physical world. This one's of course limited to being something on your desk.

Dan Saffer (20:11)
Okay. All right.

Nik Martelaro (20:32)
as opposed to some of the other experiments in hardware AI that we've seen, which are portable, wearable. ⁓ So this is something, right? It's private. It's something that lives in your space, other people. There's likely less risk here in regards to it, hearing others or knowing about others. So in that way, I mean, I think it kind of gets away from some of the other challenges that AI hardware has had and is kind of dealing with now. So it'll be interesting to see if people get it, what the actual first reviews from

Dan Saffer (20:38)
Mm-hmm.

Nik Martelaro (20:59)
from real customers are.

Dan Saffer (21:02)
All right, let's move on to our special topic for today. And since it is the beginning of January, of course, we get to jump on that January bandwagon and talk about some predictions for 2026. Where do we think AI and design are headed this year? You want to take a prediction, Nick?

Nik Martelaro (21:27)
Yeah, mean, think this dovetails really nicely with the news articles that we're seeing, right? Generative UI is, I think, something that we're going to start seeing a lot more of in 2026, partly because the software systems are getting good enough now, right? I had actually played around with some generative AI stuff like last year, and it was not entirely there yet. It was still pretty hard to control,

the actual components that you were using, they'd get rendered, it wouldn't always put things. With things like Google's A2 UI coming out as potentially a standard, with other players maybe introducing their systems to the market, and honestly, just with AI code agents getting better and better sort of every day, I think that at least for simple things, for the just enough interface experiences, the buying tickets, the scheduling something,

picking something out from a store and purchasing it, like those things, I imagine we're gonna start seeing pretty usable design patterns that evolve and exist. And we're gonna start seeing this a lot more. And I think you'll probably start seeing this across a lot of the major chatbot providers. It'll be interesting to see if for companies that are trying to develop their own systems, so rather than integrating with a chatbot, but they have ⁓ an AI enhanced experience that they're designing, are they gonna start?

leveraging these generative UI capabilities as well. They're going to start building it into their products.

Dan Saffer (22:48)
Mm-hmm Yep, that'll be a really interesting thing to see We've been exploring a little bit in this area I'm teaching this class called UI for AI and we've been exploring this kind of stuff And yeah, it'll be interesting to see it come to life this next year My first prediction is that may and maybe this is a prediction that has already come true

is that we'll see a successful app that's entirely vibe coded. By successful, I'm trying to think like, well, is it something that's like out there? And we know that this is vibe coded and we know that this was made kind of on the fly and maybe it was made for one person's like really niche thing. it gets a lot of traction all of a sudden.

Now, I don't know whether the, this could have already happened. don't know, but I haven't seen any stories about it.

Nik Martelaro (23:42)
Yeah, I I've seen different stories of like games. There's been really cool game experiences that are being basically fully vibe coded. and they have thousands of users playing them. but I do think that those are still feel a little more in the experiment space. Like I guess I would probably say that like a successful app is gotta be something, where there's a full, a full user experience that people return to.

They're going to keep coming back to it's not just a one time, oh, I played that game. I heard it was AI vibe coded. I played it. no, I would say thousands and thousands of people are continuously using this application. I guess a question here, I mean, this is always a question from a design perspective. It could be successful design, but is it successful design if it's not making money?

Dan Saffer (24:18)
and maybe paying for it.

Nik Martelaro (24:31)
And so I think maybe that's another line that we might want to think about right there is that it's actually something that's generating value, it's generating monetary value, it's generating user value. But I do think, I think that this one probably could come true, at least on a scale of like thousands and thousands of users, To see it maybe at like millions of users, I'm not entirely sure on that yet.

And the fact that it's entirely vibe coded. mean, we are getting closer to being able to do a lot, right? There's a lot of vibe coding systems. lot of players are starting to have integrations with AI code assistance, right? You've got companies like SuperBase that are trying to make, you know, their backend database systems, right? Versel, big player in this space, right? Making it sort of easy to be able to do this kind of stuff and launch your site, but also to integrate its tools so that you can basically, the AI...

code assistants can build with them. this year, we're definitely going to see a lot of infrastructure providers, The companies that are the building blocks of what we build our designs on, they're definitely, I think, going to ramp up. I think you're going to see those systems, players who are integrating more with AI code assistants, that their stuff's going to start getting adopted more.

because of this, even if it's not an entirely vibe coded app, the fact that I can go in and say, hey, put it back in here, get some user authentication, get some user accounts, and that can all be with a provider who has a really good integration with a code assistant. And I don't have to spend all my time, especially if I'm a solo designer, if I'm a small team, if we don't have all of that. I think that that is gonna be a big enabler, and that's gonna at least get us a lot closer to sort of the entirely vibe coded.

Dan Saffer (26:10)
Mm-hmm.

Nik Martelaro (26:11)
So now this brings up another point though, which is what are all the UX designers going to be doing? ⁓ Arguably there is a bit of a UX career crisis. know, Dan, you've got more experience than I do, in the industry, but you've also seen a lot more. I mean, what does this look like to you? Do you think it's, is this a blip? Do you think it's going to get better? Do you think it's going to get worse?

Dan Saffer (26:32)
I there's a crisis happening now that is that the bottom rung of the UX career ladder has really been eroded a lot in that a lot of the places where you would be doing kind of production level work and just kind of getting your feet wet, a lot of that is gone.

There's room for like senior designers and then there's room for like ⁓ very senior designers and just not much room right now for entry level designers. And I think that that's going to continue in 2026.

Now I do think that there are going to be these kind of merging of some roles that's going to continue to happening. This merge role of product manager, designer, and engineer, maybe doing something that's called a product engineer or a building designer or some other job title that we don't have yet that is all about

Basically being able to get from zero to launch at least with some low level projects or low level features on a larger tech stack. And then I think there's going to be really senior designers who are really great at things like knowing

Knowing customers, knowing users, knowing context that are dreaming up new features that are doing more design strategy work who know their space really well. But that does leave this problem of how do you get started here? And I think a lot of people who are not coming in with some of this building designer stuff are going to be at a

disadvantage and I just see this as a problem that's not going away and I don't know how we keep getting new people into the profession and certainly for us, teaching at a university, teaching people that are entering the field

or repositioning their careers to join the field is really challenging to give them that boost up and give them all the tools that they need to have now to be successful. Because I think just the days of getting a great design degree or especially the days of going through a UX boot camp and getting a job, I think those days are gone probably for good.

Nik Martelaro (29:16)
Yeah, I mean, I, I'm teaching a class this semester called the AI augmented designer. And the whole class is about how do you incorporate AI into your design process in a way that helps make you better. And hopefully helps you to produce better design. You know, that's really the goal. But I've had students, you know, talk, telling me, for example, that they're seeing on job requirements, like must have experience with vibe coding. I I find that to be astonishing in a way because

I mean, the term didn't even exist at the beginning of last year. And now all of a sudden it's a job requirement for folks. the same time, mean, maybe it's a shift from like, well, should have some developer experience. One of the things that I think is pretty cool about maybe this shift though is that vibe coding experience, depending on how a company defines that and how they sort of think about it, it may be more accessible.

Dan Saffer (29:48)
Right.

Nik Martelaro (30:10)
to folks because steering these AI systems that can write pretty good code, especially if you're working with a design system, is something that actually people can pick up, I think, faster. I think people can learn to become pretty proficient with faster because oftentimes what you're doing is this really fast iterative loop where you're evaluating the interface and the experience that you're getting from a Vibe-coded system. And then you're having this conversation with an AI to sort of update that. And I think actually a lot of designers

can work really well in that. So I wonder if as industry starts to incorporate that, as they maybe start to see the value of being able to do that, whether it's for product prototyping, for testing, for just getting new ideas created, we might start to see that this is something that actually becomes a growing aspect for UX designers.

And so maybe, companies will recognize, it's actually a lot of it, it's going to be about that taste, That when many people can do this, it's going to be about the people who can do it really well, which of course has often been the case with design, right? It's not just, you know, our field is about craft, but our field is also about taste. And so I think that that's still going to be really important, but yeah, I'm interested to see how that, how that goes and where this goes.

Dan Saffer (31:15)
Mm-hmm.

Nik Martelaro (31:22)
I don't know if it's gonna get worse, but I definitely know it's changing. Like I said, my students are telling me, they're seeing all kinds of new requirements on their job postings. So I think it's gonna be an interesting year to see how that changes.

Dan Saffer (31:34)
entry-level job requirement three to five years of vibe coding I Can see it now Two more quick predictions We're gonna see more and more figmas starting to morph more and more towards being a full stack delivery operating system I think the introduction last year of

Figma Sites and Figma Make was a way into this and I think that's just gonna be getting better and better. And now, of course they do have a lot of competition in this space, starting with the tools that designers know, which is Figma, starting to bootstrap off that and scaffold off that until they're doing a lot of the engineering.

quote unquote, right there in Figma, I think is a big advantage for them to do some really interesting things on that. What's your take on that, Nick?

Nik Martelaro (32:30)
Well, mean, Figma for many years has kind of become a standard platform for design work. know, our students are using Figma. And I think that with the introduction of these new tools, Figma make, it could possibly be where people, where designers want to stay and where they want to work. And they're going to continue to say, I want to work in Figma. The interesting thing here to me, right, is that

how much can Figma differentiate itself from other, arguably, AI code generation? Now, the interesting thing that Figma has is they're a design, know, highly design-driven organization. And so I think they might, you know, the things that they're putting out might resonate more with designers. They might have a better design sense, again, getting back to that idea of taste. I mean, and this is something, for example, that we've been seeing in, with like the student work.

⁓ Students are trying all kinds of tools and a lot of them are gravitating towards, Figma Make for, know, yeah, it's creating better front ends. It's creating front ends that I prefer. You know, it's creating, I'm able to steer it to create front ends. You know, where they then sometimes get stuck is maybe on the rest of the interaction, on sort of those more programmatic aspects of the experience. And, you know, what students in my class are doing is they're using a bunch of things, right? They're doing front end Figma Make, they pull down the code, they...

throw that into VS code with Copilot and then they're editing the code there to kind of update things to actually get all their transitions working, to get all the micro interactions working really well. But then they might hop back into Figma Make to sort of polish up front end. So it's gonna be really interesting to see what is sort of the differentiator and is that enough of a differentiator for people to wanna stay in Figma or do people catch up?

⁓ in regards to creating great front end design experiences. And then it's just a matter of, well, you pick the code editor that you prefer. You you pick your AI code agent as you prefer.

Dan Saffer (34:25)
Right. Yeah, I don't see a lot of people moving from Claude or Cursor over to Figma to do that. But I guess we'll see. ⁓ One last prediction.

Nik Martelaro (34:38)
Yeah, also kind of dovetailing with that Razer announcement. I personally think we're gonna start seeing more AI first hardware experiences. I know that in the last couple of years, ⁓ we've had some, you know, hard knocks in some ways with different products coming out and not being as successful as maybe the media had made them out to be, you know, thinking of like the... I am not wearing a humane pin. I don't have my rabbit with me.

Dan Saffer (34:58)
You're not wearing a humane pin right now?

Nik Martelaro (35:04)
You know, I don't have a friend, but you know, I think that all of these are sort of these early day experiments and new ways of trying to get AI out of our phones and out of our desktops. So I imagine we're going to see a lot more experimentation. Razor in many ways, right? This is like the first drop of sort of new hardware that it's embodying an AI agent.

in a piece of hardware. think we're going to see more of this. I would argue sort of my prediction is I don't think anyone's going to be a dominant market player in this space. I don't think this is the year that we're going to see AI first hardware really, really take off. I think we're going to see more experiments. We're going to see more interesting things. We might even get some stuff that gets some uptake and people start getting more used to it. But I don't think this is going to be the year that anything goes off like a rocket ship.

Dan Saffer (35:57)
my one caveat with this is that ⁓ Meta confirmed that it was delaying any international launches of the Ray-Ban display glasses because those were really taking off so they don't have, they can't make enough of them. And so

is this the year of smart glasses? You know, is it's moving from hey, this is something I might wear sometimes to like, hey, I'd like to wear this daily. So I think that's a pretty interesting signal to me. And I wonder, if this will be the year that we start to see a lot more

In the smart glass category. I know Google last year at IO announced the the return of Google glass with Warby Parker as one of their partners and so it would be Interesting to see if that hardware finally takes off

Nik Martelaro (36:48)
Yeah, and one aspect of that too is the fact that there's a lot of features that are not arguably AI features in smart glasses. I think AI, having AI embedded into it is a new ad that potentially maybe that is the value proposition that's gonna take it over. But I also wonder if people are just sort of getting more comfortable with even the original value proposition of smart glasses. And now it's just, yeah, this is working for us now. People are picking it up.

Dan Saffer (37:03)
Right.

Nik Martelaro (37:14)
So it'll be interesting to see in some ways like, is it the AI features or is this basically the way that the AI features know, they do get out and it's actually gonna be through the smart classes. Is that the form factor that kind of works?

Dan Saffer (37:28)
And with that, that ends our first episode here at AI and Design. We will see you next week with another set of news and hopefully a big topic to discuss. Not hopefully, we will have a big topic to discuss. It'll be something good.

Bye everyone.