Front Door

I was chatting with a friend who works at a B2C company with a deplorable website, one that’s needed an overhaul for at least a decade. They’ve built a loyal customer base, but leadership knows their window to adapt is closing fast.

B, who leads digital transformation there, says AI agents like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini are fundamentally redefining what digital transformation even means. These tools are shifting discovery, recommendation, and transactions away from traditional brand websites and into AI-driven interfaces. As a result, website UX is becoming less critical, while real-time, structured product data, delivered via APIs and feeds, is becoming essential for visibility in these systems.

For B, this shift is huge. Her company is miles behind the competition digitally, but now they have a chance to leapfrog, do something bold, stop optimizing for human visitors and start optimizing for AI models. Their sad, dated website becomes just a reference layer; the AI interface is the new front door for their customers. They can just work on getting that door right.

I asked B if she finds this exciting. She was ambivalent. Only if we get it right with the AI agents and don’t screw it up like we did with web and mobile, she said not sounding confident her leadership had the vision and drive to make this happen. This was in interesting conversation specially in light of what D has been saying about the fate of UX in the world.