Don't make WIMPy GenAI apps

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Welcome to Runtime! Today: Why generative AI technology presents an opportunity for app developers to move beyond a decades-old standard for app design, the Trump administration is thinking about throwing out years of work on enterprise software contracts, and the latest enterprise moves.

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Prompt and circumstance

For everything else that's changed over the last several decades, most people still interact with the applications they use at work and in their personal lives by pointing, clicking, and typing. It's been nearly 20 years since the launch of the iPhone forced designers and software developers to reorient their priorities around its smaller screen and limited computing power, and desktop applications are based on even older design principles.

However, generative AI technology is now forcing application developers to rethink the way users interact with their apps, as several design experts told Runtime in a recent report. There has long been a subset of apps and workflows that can be controlled with voice commands, but generative AI apps open up new opportunities to move beyond the taskbar or the mobile hamburger menu.

"I think user interfaces are largely going to go away," former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said on the Moonshots podcast last month. "Why do I have to be stuck in what is called the WIMP interface — windows, icons, menus, and pull downs — that was invented in Xerox Park, right, 50 years ago? Why am I still stuck in that paradigm?"
Generative AI app users will need to interact with something, but in Schmidt's view, they'll be able to create their own custom interface simply by giving the system clear instructions about how to present the information they seek or task they need completed to them when it's done processing.
"In the future, there won't be one standard way everybody experiences a certain software." said Amol Ajgaonkar, CTO at Insight, a solutions integrator helping companies build generative AI apps.

The spartan Google-like ChatGPT prompt box that has been the entry point to generative AI for millions of people, but early AI coding tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Warp chose to integrate a familiar-looking code-editing interface alongside a generative AI chat interface (usually on the right-hand side) to blend the traditional and the new elements on one screen. That's just one reason why there has been a surge of interest in those apps compared to other generative AI tools.

"In the software world, people have been doing things a certain way forever," said Zach Lloyd, founder and CEO of Warp.
For the most part, that involves firing up one of those traditional code editors and actually writing out the code, but getting the most out of generative AI tools and newer coding agents requires users to start in a different place.
"The shift to being like, 'no, I'm actually not going to start by doing that, I'm going to instead start by prompting an agent to do it, and I'm just going to hop in to redirect,' that's very foreign, that's a big change in muscle memory," Lloyd said.

But generative AI apps pose yet another challenge and opportunity for designers and developers: security. Poorly designed apps could compromise internal corporate data that was never meant to leave company networks, and getting that balance right in the frantic early days of generative AI app development could save companies and users from a lot of problems down the road.

Margaret Price, senior director for strategy at Microsoft, likened the current state of generative AI apps to the state of email apps in the early 2000s.
Those apps gave users little to no context about attachments that arrived in their inboxes, which led to the proliferation of worms and viruses that caused serious damage to corporate networks when people weren't given the tools to understand the danger.
"We have so many years of examples from history of huge security problems that are actually UX issues, and we still have all of those problems today when design is not prioritized," Price said.

Read the rest of the full report on Runtime here.

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Efficiency!

Enterprise tech vendors love big government contracts, as the frenzy over the late-teens JEDI contract to build cloud infrastructure for the Pentagon showed. Showing off the fact that a large government agency trusts the tech on offer has closed many a deal over the years, but these days, it sends a different signal.

Reuters reported Wednesday that the Trump administration is planning to cancel "two nearly complete software projects that took 12 years and well over $800 million combined to develop" in order to steer that business toward Palantir, Salesforce, and Workday. One project won by Accenture in 2019 to install Oracle's HR software across the Air Force and Space Force was weeks away from going live when Air Force officials put a pause on deployment to give Palantir and Salesforce a chance to bid, according to the report.

Big government contracts can certainly turn into disasters in many ways, but the report did not suggest that those leaders found anything wrong with the projects that were almost complete. “There is a very real sense that we are in the regulatory Wild West with this administration – and it should come as no surprise that the traditional limits of ‘normal contracting’ are repeatedly going to be pushed and pressed in this environment,” said Franklin Turner, a federal contracting lawyer at McCarter & English, told Reuters.

Enterprise moves

Edith Harbaugh is the new (and former) CEO of LaunchDarkly, returning to the lead role at the company she co-founded after three years as executive chair.

James McGourlay is the new interim CEO of OpenText, which appears to be eyeing its strategic options after firing former CEO Mark Barrenechea.

Joelle Pineau is the new chief AI officer at Cohere, joining the enterprise AI company after several years of AI leadership roles at Meta.

Colby Nish is the new chief revenue officer at Dialpad, following several years of sales leadership roles at Zoom.

The Runtime roundup

Cisco beat Wall Street expectations for revenue and profit and raised its guidance for the current quarter, citing increased demand for its networking products amid the AI infrastructure buildout.

Oracle announced that it will offer Google Cloud's Gemini AI models to its cloud infrastructure customers, one day after laying off more than 100 people from its cloud infrastructure team.

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Thanks for reading — see you Tuesday!