#159 Beyond the Copilot: The 4 AI Patterns Every Designer Should Know

So a few months ago, I was working with a client which was a product company, and yeah, they basically came to me with a very clear brief.

They said, "We want to add AI.

We're seeing a lot of potential.

We know that the market is basically demanding for AI.

Everyone's adding AI, so we also want to add AI.

And right now we are thinking about adding basically a chatbot on the side of our product." And they asked me to help them to basically design and create the ch- the, the chatbot.

Um, they said that they already talked with their dev team.

They already had some kind of, like, a scope for the chatbot, but what they really needed was a bit more strategy and also some kind of, like, knowledge how to design this chatbot.

And yeah, I was really honest.

Um, so I said, "Yeah, great, but let's slow down a little bit.

Tell me what you actually want users to do with this chatbot." And then after 45 minutes, we looked at each other and realized this is not a chatbot problem that you're trying to solve here.

What users actually needed was more, or was definitely not a conversational interface.

They did not want to type questions.

They wanted the system to surface the right information at the right moment automatically without them having to ask.

And I think this was a very helpful realization.

So we ended up designing something completely different, something much simpler, something much more useful.

And that experience is something that I see all the time.

Um, many teams default to chat because it's the most visible AI pattern out there when we think of, like, ChatGPT and Copilot and Gemini.

So chat is what we've been surrounded by for the last four years, pretty much.

But chat is just one pattern, and it is just one way AI can show up in a product.

And when it's the only pattern you know, you apply it to everywhere, pretty much, so even if it doesn't fit.

And, um, I really like to call this the Copilot reflex.

Today, in this podcast episode, I want to give you the antidote, actually.