What if natural language interfaces are a journey not a destination?

As anyone who spends time in meetings will know, chatting with colleagues is pleasant — but not always productive.

We can spend an hour in conversation, feel like we’ve made progress, and yet still not have achieved a shared understanding. Because chat is, by its nature, exploratory, open-ended, and reliant on ambiguous signals.

And that’s just as true of AI as it is of people.

Over the past year, there has been a constant flow of vendors releasing chat interfaces for their existing products — and it often feels as if natural language is being pushed as the dominant future interaction model for all software.

But as these systems move from novelty to production, a different constraint is starting to emerge. Chat makes it easier to ask for something when you don’t know exactly what you want — but also makes it harder to express what you want with enough ...