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SXSW 2025: AI doesn’t give a damn about UI; Futurists are the hottest job on the market

Federico Francioni
UX Collective
Published in
9 min read6 days ago

The author Federico Francioni jumping in front of a SXSW 2025 banner

SXSW just ended and since you appreciated last year’s recap, here I am again with my personal take on the most enlightening insights I heard, and a bunch of links to the coolest sessions / documents I found. If you want to know more about the conference, click on the article below. Let’s jump to what matters.

Last year format resonated with readers, and they asked for more original content to, so I tried to gather all the golden nuggets I could. For 2025, I decided to focus on 2 main themes:

  • UI? Who Needs UI? AI’s Rise to Prominence
  • Futurist: the new must-have

UI? Who Needs UI? AI’s Rise to Prominence

The phrase “AI is the new UI” reflects a fundamental shift in how humans interact with technology, where artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly serves as the primary interface between users and digital systems. This concept suggests that AI is no longer just a tool or a feature but has become the central mechanism through which users engage with software, devices, and services.

Instead of having a human interact with your UI, in the future, it’ll be an AI agent using your UI on behalf of its human. At the limit, human users will vanish from the web and many software applications.

A likely scenario is that the “user” only interacts with…

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Written by Federico Francioni

Head of Digital Ecosystem at Meta ∞ Striving to envision, design & deliver outstanding experiences for all kinds of users 🔮 FedericoFrancioni.com

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