Why Every AI Feature Shouldn't Be A Chatbot

The design community's reflexive turn to conversational interfaces for every AI use case is a strategic mistake—not every user intent benefits from dialogue, and forcing chat where structured inputs or visual outputs make sense creates friction instead of value. Designers building AI products need to match modality to actual user goals: sometimes that's text generation, sometimes it's classification or real-time visualization, and sometimes the LLM should be invisible infrastructure rather than the interface itself. Success goes to teams that pick the right tool for each moment in the user journey, not those with the most sophisticated chatbots.