From UX to Ax: Designing for AI Agents–and Why It Matters

"Future interfaces will be text-based."

Wrong. As the article even admits, multimodal AI turns imagery into text values for analysis (or even tokens/vectors). Sure, current AI bot crawlers are not multimodal for speed and cost reasons. But stating the future will be text based when we can already do visual processing with AI is just shortsighted.

"design should no longer be reserved only for humans, but also accommodate AI agents"

The design of the web has never been reserved for only humans. It's always been machine readable. In fact design principles for SEO have specifically integrated machine-readable features like alt tagging, schema, screenreader tech etc. What has been true is that various organisations (google included) have spearheaded a user-first approach. We can instead predict that this will follow with AI, lead with human first design and have the AI mimic to understand content. Since AI is far more human-like than your standard SEO crawler this principle follows even more strongly. Why prioritise AI design over humans when AI is trying to behave like we do?

"shifting from a “user-first” to an “agent-first” mindset"

Not sure I understand this section, it suggests making 2 distinct interfaces, one for humans, one for AI. As if APIs don't already exist? Plus, for when an AI is being agentic, they absolutely should walk through the same steps as a human. There is zero reason to duplicate an interface for a tool that impersonates a human, that just multplies all test cases by 2. Pointless waste.

"In the future, the user experience will focus primarily on supervising and verifying the actions of the AI agent."

What? UX does not supervise or verify, UX itself is not an agent like a human is or AI can be.

And then the article actually gets to sensible technical UX advice for SEO and accessibility that will also benefit AI. But it was mostly slop to get there. Was this written by AI?