Anne Cantera - Conversation Design Institute
Anne Cantera argues that conversation designers aren't going away - they're fragmenting into more specialized roles that didn't exist before. Knowledge Engineer, Model Designer, AI Orchestration Designer - new titles that describe the same fundamental craft of shaping how a system talks to a human, just operating closer to the model layer than the script layer. The point is that LLMs didn't eliminate the need for intentional conversation design; they elevated the stakes for it.
From the piece:
Right now we're in the hybrid hell phase. Companies are retrofitting conversational AI onto click-based apps and both experiences are mediocre. Jobs are available for fixing broken hybrid interfaces, conversation design retrofits, AI experience designers, it's a vague title but there's real demand.
In 2 to 4 years, voice-first becomes default, screens become fallback. Navigation dies, prediction takes over. Jobs shift to conversation designers, prompt engineers for UI, multimodal experience designers, failure mode specialists.
In 4 to 7 years we'll see the new specializations. Ephemeral UI design, interfaces that appear only when needed. Context-aware prediction systems. Personal AI customization. New roles like AI personalization designers, serendipity engineers, yes really, verification UX specialists, and orchestration designers managing complex agent swarms.
As multi-agent systems become the norm, the conversation doesn't live inside one model anymore; it lives in the choreography between several. Someone has to design that. It won't be the engineers.