All AI model companies are currently chat-first — they all have a single textbox on their home screens where users can input their questions — but this might not be the final form that AI interactions will take.
Box CEO Aaron Levie has said that instead of chat, the final form factor of AI agents could be be autonomous agents running quietly in the background. “ I think collectively we’re seeing what (AI interactions) are becoming,” he said on a podcast. “If you think about two years ago, the post ChatGPT moment, we thought that we were looking at the form factor of AI, which is, you’re talking back and forth. The real, ultimate end state of AI, and thus AI agents, are these are autonomous things that run In the background on your behalf and executing real work for you,” he added.
“And in an ideal world, (you’re) interacting with them relatively little relative to the amount of value that they’re creating. And so there’s some kind of metric where the more work that it’s doing without you having to intervene, the more agentic it’s becoming. And I think that’s sort of the paradigm that we’re seeing,” he added.
Levie seemed to be saying that most of our use of AI in the coming years might not happen by asking questions, but through AI agents running silently in the background. He seemed to suggest that there would be a future where AI agents would be doing all sorts of tasks on the users’ behalf while being relatively inconspicuous. These AI agents would then either give users the final results of whatever task that they were completing, or silently get these tasks done without even informing the user. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has gone even further to say that static user interfaces will go away with AI, and all user-interfaces will be created on the fly based on specific needs, and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky too has said that AI won’t have a single dominant interface like ChatGPT.
If Levie is right, it suggests a fundamental rethinking of the human-AI interface, moving beyond the current paradigm of active, conversational commands. For businesses and developers, this signals a crucial pivot: the future of AI may not be about building a better chatbot, but about architecting a silent, autonomous workforce that can anticipate needs and execute complex tasks in the background. This shift from a ‘conversational partner’ to a ‘proactive agent’ represents the next frontier in artificial intelligence, promising to unlock unprecedented productivity by transforming AI from a tool we actively use into a seamless, intelligent layer that empowers us invisibly.