The App Store icon displayed on the phone’s screen is seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, … [+]
The app economy is coming to an end fast.
A sensational feeling, perhaps, but let’s keep playing this scenario anyway.
Over the past year I’ve been closely tracking how much of the enterprise software and SaaS services we use will devolve into data services or databases. AI tools and agents will remove the layers of abstraction and enable a single pane of glass use case where we can leverage multi-modal generative tools to build a real-time interface for a specific question or use case. (Think Gen AI research for business.)
Now, shift your thinking to the app experience that most of us have today when interacting with our mobile devices and tablets. Many of us use dozens, if not hundreds, of apps for everything from banking and travel to work and play.
To make it all work, we organize apps into folders and use Face ID to give us easy access to sign in. In the process, we allow these apps clean access to our data to ensure experiences are good — often with little regard for how the data is used (a topic for another day). App builders have built apps for better UI/UX and connectivity to data services such as travel sharing, hotel and flights, catering and investment services.
So imagine a future AI-powered device with a powerful security operations center with GPU/NPU and amazing connectivity that allows digital assistants and agents to sit at the operating system level. You can simply talk to your digital assistant.
In my opinion, this is where Apple Intelligence has a big opportunity, in which Siri (or whatever it’s called after all) understands your request, analyzes the apps and references the ones that provide the best experience. There will be a similar “super-agent” that will also reside on Android.
Ultimate Travel (App)
As of now, if you want to book a trip, you can use an aggregator service like Google Flights or an app like Expedia. These apps have access to a wide range of data and a user interface that makes booking a flight or trip easy. As a user, we are limited to the data services of that application and/or a set of applications that we can use to compare with each other (such as Google Flights or Lending Tree).
In the future, we will be able to use an OS-level digital assistant that is multimodal (text, speech) for our needs. Imagine what it would be able to do: For example, I could book a flight to San Francisco, a hotel until Thursday, a driver to pick me up when I arrive, and a reservation for a dinner date on Wednesday – all with skill. to confirm appointments and other tasks.
The assistant + agent technology will be able to navigate your preferences, such as which airline you prefer to fly based on status, travel budget and seat preference and availability. Will be able to perform the task with secure payment. It can select your favorite travel app or car delivery service and preferred hotel based on room type, amenities, services and location based on your appointments.
The same principle applies to restaurant reservations, and of course appointment confirmations will be easy, but always useful to make sure you’re traveling for good reasons. Additionally, it can use/find data and services that you don’t already have an app for, as well as find better prices for shopping, travel, or even suggest a better dinner location based on the person’s preferences. that you are meeting. .
Why do we need apps? At least we know. Are legacy applications data services and user interfaces that can be generated in real time? Are apps going away or becoming more of a data layer as our business apps are likely to become? My preference is not the app. It’s the experience that the app creates. Say hello to my ride, make my coffee, tell me my account balance.
Enterprise Applications: Getting Started?
And we’ve all heard for some time that the enterprise application layer is changing. We have companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Oracle and SAP to name a few all fighting to be the one-stop shop for their customers to drive productivity and efficiency. Copilots and Assistants are expanding into multi-threaded reasoning agents that can navigate and arbitrate a multitude of data services that will probably soon be deprecated.
Knowing that business applications tend to be more difficult to use with often outdated user experiences – this space feels like a bastion of opportunity for disruption, where instead of navigating between dozens of applications like CRM, ERP, HCM, SCM, you’re all about it and offer a real-time AI-generated UX that will constantly adapt and optimize based on your preferences.
UI/UX will be an abstraction of the combined open data ecosystem and the ability for us to articulate this need. But we’re not far from a multi-modal future where we just communicate what we need and let the agents do the work.
Apps become a thing of the past. The only question is when.