Agentic AI and the great service collapse
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Fair warning: this one is only for the service design nerds. So about 8 years ago I defined a “service” as “a system of people, processes, and goods”, but what happens when “people, processes, and goods” collapses into one entity? Is it still a service? Or are we delivering something else now?
Agentic AI gets defined in a lot of ways, my plain language definition is this: it’s AI that can do more stuff; instead of doing an action then stopping for input, it can chain together a bunch of actions based on its own analyses of ongoing inputs.
Here’s a hopefully familiar example: Let’s say your delivery never arrived, so you start a chat with customer service. Generative AI can take each thing you input and generate an answer to send back to you, leading to the typical back and forth: my package is missing, I’m sorry to hear it’s missing, did you look around for it?, ok here are your options, what would you like to do, ok I’ll issue a refund.
In contrast, agentic AI can take your input, ‘my package is missing’, investigate what happened, evaluate the options, decide on the best path forward, and then initiate a refund, all without needing any additional input from you or anyone else.
So there are no people involved in the back stage of this service exchange, the processes are fluid and generated in real time, and the goods are arguably secondary or even tertiary to the exchange. So does the concept of a “service” still exist?
Well, as a user, in this case a customer whose package has gone missing, the concept of “service” still exists pretty much exactly the same. But from the perspective of a business, I think the word “service” is about to undergo a massive shift. Right now service is a line item in every budget, and service spend is an important consideration that can have company-wide repercussions. Which means service design is designing for a thing that’s meaningful to the overall business.
With the rise of agentic AI and the potential ease of replacing service costs with AI solutions, I think there’s a high likelihood that AI spend is going to eclipse service spend in importance. In other words, businesses will shift focus from service to IT spend, and the word service will lose that exciting holistic meaning it once had. Which means service design can no longer claim to be about the overall business, and the design of service becomes synonymous with only the design of customer experience. Which, to be fair, is kind of how it started out.
Where does that leave us? Well, what I like about service design is that it’s explicitly about designing FOR. You can’t design a service as if it’s a simple machine, so there’s a fundamental recognition of lack of control. Agentic AI demands that we all embrace that same fundamental lack of control, and shift to designing FOR. So I think service design could be a useful framework for a shift to AI design, just probably with a lot of chaos and hand-wringing along the way. Thanks for listening.
Additional reading: https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/clouded-judgement-81624-genai-growing and https://medium.com/@shahrsays/so-what-actually-is-service-design-e0ed602b77a9