At the UX Reboot 2026 event organized by UX-Republic at École 42, the forward-thinking media outlet Usbek & Rica hosted "Prophecy," an original format blending journalism, foresight, and a game show. Hosted by François Fluhr and Alexandre Kouchner, this interactive discussion used a wheel of fortune to randomly select and explore three major predictions about the future of UX and AI . The goal? To decipher, with audience participation, the upheavals awaiting design in the face of the emergence of the agentic web and the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence.
Prophecy 1: The death of the website
What if the traditional website was just a cultural convention on the verge of ending? As conversational web and autonomous agents bypass our screens, the future of UX now lies in the invisibility of interfaces.
This major technological disruption was at the heart of the discussions during our Prophecy live session , organized during our UX Reboot event at École 42 Paris. Co-hosted with Alexandre Kouchner, editorialist for the foresight publication Usbek & Rica , this interactive format used a wheel of fortune to explore the possible futures of our sector [1, 2]. The first observation, which challenges our assumptions as designers, is that the traditional website, made up of menus, clicks, and conversion funnels, may be living its last years.
The collapse of traffic and the advent of Zero UI
The website as we know it is only a little over 35 years old. Yet, HTML pages and conversion funnels are not immutable truths, but simply browsing habits. Today, conversational AI and intelligent agents are quietly making their way into the mainstream. The numbers speak for themselves: globally, organic traffic to news sites from Google fell by 33% between 2024 and 2025. Search engines respond directly to user intent without linking to the sources.
"Once AI agents navigate and act in place of the user, the site becomes a de facto API, an invisible infrastructure, which is no longer a destination for users but a source for agents."
This shift towards invisible interfaces, theorized under the concept of "Zero UI" by giants like Microsoft, is profoundly changing user journeys. AI agents, in particular, prove to be far more effective when accessing structured data streams and APIs rather than a traditional graphical interface designed for the human eye.
From click to continuous storytelling
Faced with this deliberate invisibility, new usage models are emerging. Major American platforms like Etsy, Walmart, and Shopify are adapting their processes to allow transactions to be made directly through ChatGPT. In France, Leboncoin has opened its catalog of 89 million listings to OpenAI's conversational agent to initiate personalized shopping journeys via voice or text.
In the world of brands and luxury, the experience is being reinvented in narrative form. The Italian brand Brunello Cucinelli offers a website without traditional pages, where the user navigates in a continuous flow, in a documentary approach that prioritizes editorial immersion over frantic clicking.
"If the interface is no longer a page but a conversation, an intention, a result, then everything the UX sector has built over the last 20 years needs to be reinvented."
Counter-trends: a confidence with variable geometry
The transition to a fully agent-based system, however, faces a significant human barrier: trust. The recurring risks of hallucinations and the opacity of algorithms lead many users to demand a return to the source to verify the accuracy of the information.
Moreover, this adoption is geographically fragmented. According to Edelman's study, The AI Trust Imperative , while 72% of users trust AI in China , this figure collapses to only 32% in the United States.
UX-Republic's UX Takeaways: Successfully Navigating the GEO Shift
The role of designers does not stop, it shifts from an economy of attention (keeping the user on a screen) to an economy of intention (responding as quickly as possible by voice or writing).
- Designing architecture for machines To be indexed by LLMs, the content of your platforms must be optimized for the GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). Favor clear structures, reliable numerical data, bulleted lists and dense text archives.
- Designing for oral delivery : With more than 7 billion voice notes Exchanged daily on WhatsApp, voice interaction creates a new, intimate relationship with the tool. Conversational design must be able to manage nuances, implicit intentions, and reassuring micro-cops.
Intrigued by the agentic shift? To further explore the future of interfaces and SEO, discover all the debates and discussions from the Prophecy session by watching the replay of our live event at École 42.
Prophecy 2: AI will make us all idiots
By constantly designing seamless user journeys, aren't we stifling collective critical thinking? Faced with the temptation of cognitive delegation, UX design must overcome its greatest challenge: reintroducing friction to preserve our critical thinking.
This ethical and cognitive questioning fueled the second act of our live "Prophecy" session at École 42 Paris during the latest edition of UX Reboot . In partnership with the foresight publication Usbek & Rica , we confronted our practices with a fundamental paradox: while our historical role is to reduce cognitive load, designing overly fluid interfaces risks making us structurally detrimental. This investigation explores the necessity of designing for human agency rather than for the elimination of effort.
The trap of “Cognitive Offloading”
Generative AI is emerging as the most formidable cognitive delegation tool ever devised. By entrusting it with our analyses, syntheses, and decision-making, we are causing a decline in our autonomous critical thinking. A landmark study by the Center for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability even shows that intensive use of AI tools is correlated with a measurable decrease in our critical thinking abilities.
"One of the founding promises of UX is to reduce cognitive load, to make things simpler, smoother, more intuitive. But if reducing cognitive load impoverishes thinking, then good design could be, structurally, harmful design."
By delegating our thinking, we risk losing sight of our own abilities. Echoing the words of neuropsychologist Sylvie Chokron, Alexandre Kouchner warns of a major epistemological risk: that of becoming “people who don’t know that they don’t know . ”
“We risk becoming people who don’t know that we don’t know. I can’t speak Korean if I know how to use Google Translate. I can’t calculate an azimuth when I’m using Apple Maps. And Word’s autocorrect doesn’t guarantee my mastery of the subjunctive mood.”
The decline in choice and the anxiety of Gen Z
Historically, modern marketing has always celebrated freedom of choice. Yet, in the age of information overload, choice generates decision fatigue and anxiety (the paradox of choice theorized by Barry Schwartz). AI then becomes appealing because it relieves us of the effort of deciding. This is the advent of Agentic AI Shopping : according to Salesforce, 39% of American consumers are ready to let AI shop autonomously for them.
However, awareness is growing, particularly among younger generations. The widespread adoption of these technologies does not equate to blind acceptance. A Gallup survey conducted in early 2026 among 14- to 29-year-olds revealed that enthusiasm for AI had plummeted by 14 points in a single year . Only 31% of them believe it fosters the emergence of new, creative ideas.
"The interface is political. If code is law, the disappearance of our agentic capacities transforms it into constitutional law."
UX-Republic's UX Takeaways: Thinking about ethical friction
To avoid becoming the architects of cognitive impoverishment, interaction design must reinvent itself around a new value: agency.
- Defending a right to settings Echoing the work of Arcep, we must design user-friendly interfaces where the user retains control. The user must be able to choose their default AI model, set their privacy rules, manage the tool's memory, and even modulate the tone of the responses.
- Reintroducing healthy friction : Design pauses in decision-making processes (for example, for voting choices or important financial transactions, where already 16% of voters used AI in municipal elections according to Terra Nova) in order to encourage the user to actively check sources and validate their choice consciously.
Ready to reintroduce ethical friction into your career paths? To delve deeper into the challenges of cognitive load and critical thinking in the age of AI, relive the highlights and analysis from Usbek & Rica directly in the event replay.
Prophecy 3: Design will no longer be a profession
When any algorithm can generate a functional interface with a single click, what's left for the designer? Faced with visual standardization and the proliferation of automated mediocrity, strategic discernment and human empathy become our best weapons.
This is the third major trend we examined using our wheel of fortune during the Prophecy live event , organized as part of the UX Reboot at École 42 Paris. Alongside Alexandre Kouchner from Usbek & Rica , we discussed a future where the monopoly on screen creation collapses in the face of generative AI. In a world awash with "slop" (those mediocre, mass-produced content and interfaces), the designer's value shifts radically from technical execution to strategy and cultural distinctiveness.
The interface as a product of a prompt
Interface creation is becoming increasingly accessible. Figma, Adobe, Canva, Framer, and Uizard now integrate generative features capable of generating mockups, animated prototypes, or style guides from simple text descriptions. The figures confirm the scale of this shift: by 2028, Gartner predicts that 70% of new enterprise applications will be developed using low-code or no-code solutions.
"What is becoming rare is no longer execution. It is taste, discernment, the ability to set the right constraints, to understand a human, cultural, and strategic context."
This loss of the technical monopoly is reminiscent of the history of photography. The widespread adoption of smartphones has caused the number of photos taken worldwide to explode, while simultaneously shifting the value of mastering the device towards the artistic process.
“Design could become what writing became after the invention of printing: a widespread, ubiquitous skill, but one whose scope is truly mastered by only a select few. Everyone will know how to produce. Very few will still know how to create.”
The threat of homogenization and "UX Slop"
AI is trained on billions of existing models. By its very statistical definition, it tends to reproduce the average interface. If all industry players use the same tools and databases to design their user journeys, we are heading towards extreme standardization. An interchangeable, smooth, and uniform web.
"The risk is a massive homogenization of aesthetics and function... The triumph of design without genius, a digital world generated by Midjourney: same light, same colors, same compositions, same slightly too perfect faces. It's a boring world."
Furthermore, owning a graphic design tool doesn't automatically make each of us a designer well-versed in accessibility, the psychology of cognitive biases, or mental workload. Without this methodological perspective, the web risks becoming saturated with "UX Slop" : a proliferation of disposable micro-products, toxic, manipulative, or absurd interfaces.
The counter-signals: the price of human involvement
Faced with this deluge of automated content, the perceived value of human intervention is skyrocketing. On platforms like Etsy and Vinted, creations certified as "handmade" or "created without AI" have seen exceptional growth since 2024.
For the end user, the human factor remains a powerful driver of trust. According to a study conducted by Adobe in 2025, 71% of consumers place more trust in a brand if they are assured that a human is involved in the creative design process.
UX-Republic's UX Takeaways: Cultivating Uniqueness and Resilience
The designer no longer needs to try to compete in speed or mathematical optimization with algorithms designed to beat them in this area. Their added value lies elsewhere.
- To harness AI in order to better disrupt it Use automated interface generation to eliminate time-consuming first-level tasks (generating grids, screen skeletons). Consider these average statistical proposals as a starting point to be surpassed by your creative boldness and uniqueness.
- To become the guarantor of ethics and human empathy Invest heavily in user research, inclusivity, digital sobriety and the fight against dark patterns to design products that sustainably respect humans.
“The future of design will not only be about collaborating with AI, but also about resisting it. What makes no sense is trying to be ‘more AI than AI’—producing faster, smoother, more optimized. The machine will always win at that game. On the contrary, we can use automatic generation as a statistical average to surpass…”
Prophecy, a live event hosted by François Fluhr & Alexandre Kouchner, Usbek & Rica
