Own the Surface

I have been thinking about the difference between the surface and the interface in AI, and I increasingly think the surface may matter far more than the interface.

Instinct on WhatsApp is a good example. Instinct can create a really good AI experience where you send a voice note, tell it what you want done, and it goes and gets that work done for you. But Instinct is essentially the interface. WhatsApp is the surface. And I think that distinction matters quite a bit.

The interface can get better very quickly, but it can also get copied and commoditised very quickly. Models improve, features get replicated, and things that feel differentiated today can become fairly common over time. The surface is much harder to replace because it is already deeply embedded in people's lives.

If you look at WhatsApp, it already has your conversations, relationships, habits and years of usage sitting inside it. iMessage has a similar advantage because of how deeply it is embedded into the iPhone and into how people communicate every day. So even if these surfaces are behind on some of the new AI experiences initially, they can catch up and still remain extremely powerful because the user is already there.

In some ways, Instinct shows how well this can work. You can put a completely new AI experience inside an existing surface and suddenly enable a lot more without asking the user to change behavior very much. You send a voice note, which is something you already know how to do, except now that voice note can actually result in work getting done.

But there is another part of this that I find even more interesting. You could argue that AI also gives us an opportunity to build a completely new surface.

Most of the computing surfaces we use today were built around the way we had to interact with computers. We needed screens, keyboards, apps, browsers, menus and touchscreens because that was the setup required to tell software what to do. In a way, we learned how to operate computers because computers could not really understand us.

AI changes that quite dramatically. If intelligence can understand language, voice, context and intent, then increasingly I should just be able to tell the computer what I want done and have it figure out a lot of the rest. I do not necessarily need to sit in front of a screen, open the right application, navigate through the workflow and then do everything myself.

And I think that creates an opportunity to build a new surface for an intelligence led, agent first world.

What that surface looks like is much less obvious. It could still be the phone. It could be glasses. It could be an earbud, a ring, a bracelet, or something completely different. We probably do not know yet, and I am not sure the form factor itself is even the most important part.

The more interesting question is whether we can build a surface where you are no longer constantly operating the computer. You express what you want, and intelligence does more and more of the work around you.

I think both things can happen at the same time. Existing surfaces like WhatsApp and iMessage are going to become much more powerful as AI gets built into them, and their existing distribution, habits and user love give them a huge advantage. But AI may also give us an opportunity to rethink the surface itself and build something that is native to this new way of interacting with computers.

Interfaces can get copied and commoditised.

Surfaces are much harder to displace.

And that is why I increasingly think the surface may be where the more durable power sits.