Getting a grip

I've written in Platformland and elsewhere about the idea of 'composite services' - user journeys assembled from component parts. I've also written about the idea of social objects, such as digital credentials, mediating the relationship between a user and a service. To some extent, composite services and social objects run against the idea of 'the end-to-end journey' as the primary goal in digital design.

AI agents mean composite services become the norm, rather than the exception, because the immediate cost of assembling new user journeys will be radically reduced. What does it mean to design when services can be infinitely reassembled?

I think the job of the designer/technologist in this world becomes designing a series of objects that can be acted on by an AI agent - they need to be grippable, for lack of a better term. For human users, it needs to be clear when those things have been 'gripped' - when somehitng is being acted upon. Those objects need to be recognisable and trustedable. A payment needs to be a payment wherever it is used. A decision needs to be a decision. A task needs to be a task. A verifiable fact needs to be a verifiable fact. It needs to be clear what they are, when they are bing used and what options exist to change direction.

The act of unbundling services is the design of new social objects. Ones that can be acted upon by agents and provide clarity for users.