Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience outlined five UX planes. While foundational for design’s role, this model has always fallen short in the face of complex enterprise systems.

Now with the arrival of GenAI we need to challenge the primacy of the graphical interface with the introduction context-aware, multimodal, and adaptive experiences. It’s time to rethink UX as an emergent, AI-mediated systems. Like a building on a floating foundation, generative user experiences achieve balance—not by resisting change, but by responding to it. They rest not on fixed inputs, but on the dynamic equilibrium of evolving data, adjusting in real time to preserve coherence and relevance not a static hierarchy of layers.

With Generative AI promising intelligent agents in enterprise software there is a significant acceleration in the desire of businesses to automate processes and augment, or even replace, human decision-making. As companies race to implement agents with their promise of speed, scale, and efficiency, there's a risk of prioritizing problems based on their ability to be solved with this technology, rather than on their impact on the business.

Design pundits have been selling design short for years. Don’t take my word, a your favorite genAI tool to create a description for “Design Strategy”. I will wait. Keep in mind these generated descriptions are based on based on what is in the world puling from articles, papers, books and posts. Its no wonder design struggles; we are our own worst biographers.