Who's the user now? What happens to the UX when the user is a human and an agent

About the Talk

Sriram Venugopal, Senior Product Designer at Zalando, took on a question that is quietly reshaping design: as AI agents mature, they increasingly act on behalf of people, browsing, deciding, and transacting without a human ever seeing the screen. So if the agent is the one using the product, who are we actually designing for?

Held at Spiced Academy, the talk worked through what changes when agents sit between people and the interfaces we build.

Key threads from the talk:

• ●The user is no longer only human: what it means for UX when an agent, not a person, is the one reading the screen and taking the action.
• ●Designing for two audiences at once: serving the human's intent and the agent's need for structure, clarity, and predictable behavior in the same product.
• ●Trust and control: how people stay confident that an agent acting for them is doing the right thing, and where the human stays in the loop.
• ●What this means for the craft: how the shift from screens to agent-mediated experiences changes the questions designers should be asking now.