The Real AI Bottleneck: Bad UX

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As Shopify CEO Toby Lütke emphasized this week in his viral company memo, businesses like his already consider AI to be an indispensable tool in the workplace (here's how you can get started using it). 

But there are large gaps in adoption, even within narrowly defined groups of people. Anthropic’s education report found that computer science professionals routinely use AI, yet computer science students—who will soon make their way into the professional world—aren’t learning to use AI at anywhere near the same clip. This gap is echoed by a study in Harvard Business Review, which found that while AI is effective at enhancing learning generally, there are persistent fears that it could negatively impact critical thinking. If we fail to bridge the gap between academia and the professional world, we're doing a disservice to an entire generation. Stanford’s AI Index Report underscores how a similar disparity is taking shape  not just in education, but in how AI is adopted across disciplines and regions.

One possible solution comes from Nan Yu, the head of product at product management software company Linear. Yu argued compellingly this week that "AI adoption is a UX problem”: The technology’s power is undeniable, but its widespread adoption depends entirely on thoughtful, human-centered interface design. (For some great examples, check out these explorations on X by artist and researcher Kat the Poet Engineer.) To truly harness AI’s potential, we must clearly define the role of the human and, therefore, what we want humans to learn.—Alex Duffy