Moving Beyond The Chat Box: How To Unlock Intelligent UI

Elias Stahl is the Founder & CEO of HILOS, an AI lab and software platform dissolving the barriers between design and production.

gettyAbout one in 10 people worldwide, and up to one in five Americans, show symptoms of Dyslexia today. Even for those of us that don’t, endless chat conversations are fatiguing. The challenge is, language is by far the most efficient and effective way to trade context and leverage the full intelligence of these models. The world is desperate for a better way to communicate with LLMs—that’s the bet that OpenAI just made with the release of GPT-6 and what it calls intelligent UI.

Intelligent UI brings together component libraries as visual templates to communicate within, so an LLM can build you charts, graphs, slideshows, callouts or other familiar visuals rather than rely on text. Interaction can take place within these component libraries and not have to go through chat. Component libraries are key to this operating quickly, since building entirely new visuals takes time. And for the builders reading this there is already an open standard for generative UI that’s been in the works for the past eight months.

Architects, footwear designers and VFX designers all have their unique visual language for communication, and each of these fields, unsurprisingly, hates lengthy text descriptions in their place. Anthropic and OpenAI may not spend time customizing bespoke component libraries for these specialized industries, but these libraries will become a critical interface layer for the next visual language of AI.

Component libraries that are highly specialized and unique to a profession can convey intelligence, detail and context in a newly powerful way, one that drives creative collaboration and wonder rather than the fatigue creatives feel from rows of text and constant context switching. Footwear design is a rich example—it comprises an array of specialists and a rich, creative language: not just designers but developers, model makers, color, material and finish designers, pattern engineers, biomechanical testers, merchandisers, all collaborating across sketches, images, material callouts, color boards, technical drawings, tooling files, pattern files and creative briefs. This is an industry screaming for intelligent UI.

While there are commonalities, there is no standard definition for a tech pack. Every company has their own internal visual language as well, their own unique brand and creative DNA. And they protect it.

And that is a very different kind of challenge. Building visual components and rules for your own industry is one thing, but defining these in a way that learns and grows with a user’s own visual language is more nuanced and complex. Bringing together entire creative workflows is critical for that effort, as well as deep enough engagement to build a personalized creative language for your customer.

In 2023 the world was amazed by a simple chat interface. What will the world see in 2027?

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