On-demand UI! Salesforce announced its pilot of “generative canvas,” a radically adaptive interface for CRM users. It’s a dynamically generated dashboard that uses AI to assemble the right content and UI elements based on your specific context or request. Look out, enterprise, here comes Sentient Design.
I love to see big players doing this. Here at Big Medium, we’re building on similar foundations to help our clients build their own AI-powered interfaces. It’s exciting stuff! Sentient Design is about creating AI-mediated experiences that are aware of context/intent so that they can adapt in real time to specific needs. Veronika Kindred and I call these radically adaptive interfaces, and it shows that machine-intelligent experiences can be so much more than chat. This new Salesforce experience offers a good example.
For Salesforce, generative canvas is an intelligent interface that animates traditional UI in new and effective ways. It’s a perfect example of a first-stage radically adaptive interface—and one that’s well suited to the sturdy reliability of enterprise software. Generative canvas uses all of the same familiar data sources as a traditional Salesforce experience might, but it assembles and presents that data on the fly. Instead of relying on static templates built through a painstaking manual process, generative canvas is conceived and compiled in real time. That presentation is tailored to context: it pulls data from the user’s calendar to give suggested prompts and relevant information tailored to their needs. Every new prompt or new context gives you a new layout. (In Sentient Design’s triangle framework, we call this the Bespoke UI experience posture.)
So the benefits are: 1) highly tailored content and presentation to deliver the most relevant content in the most relevant format (better experience), and 2) elimination or reduction of manual configuration processes (efficiency).
In Sentient Design, we call this the Bespoke UI experience posture.
Never fear: you’re not turning your dashboard into a hallucinating robot fever dream. The UI stays on the rails by selecting from a collection of vetted components from Salesforce’s Lightning design system: tables, charts, trends, etc. AI provides radical adaptivity; the design system provides grounded consistency. The concept promises a stable set of data sources and design patterns—remixed into an experience that matches your needs in the moment.
This is a tidy example of what happens when you sprinkle machine intelligence onto a familiar traditional UI. It starts to dance and move. And this is just the beginning. Adding AI to the UX/UI layer lets you generate experiences, not just artifacts (images, text, etc.). And that can go beyond traditional UI to yield entirely new UX and interaction paradigms. That’s a big focus of Big Medium’s product work with clients these days—and of course of the Sentient Design book. Stay tuned, lots more to come.
