The user experience professions and practice have always fundamentally been about usability and ease of use.

The two players in that story, the users and the experiences they’re trying to figure out, have both always presented shortcomings in that human-machine relationship.

Either the user is not very competent or experienced or is otherwise compromised in their ability to figure out the interface. Or, the interface has not been well designed, does not use commonly accepted human factors, practices and principles, and otherwise presents challenges that the user struggles with.

Usually, the gap is a combination of those two dynamics.

In this decades-old scenario, UX has always been about closing the gap created by those two complex sets of shortcomings. UX has been the intermediary between the limitations of the user, the limitations of the interface encountered, and the combination of the two.

As the intermediary in that relationship between humans and the device:

• Machines and virtual interfaces of all types present operational choices and tasks to users, who then must learn and figure those out to be productive or successful.
• The UXD and UXR professions have learned what operational principles work best for humans and try to apply those to close any gaps that exist. In this capacity, those professions played the role of removing barriers, friction, and other impediments to completing tasks and making machines work.

User experience research recruits people who have limited technical skills and uses that as the litmus test for how well-designed are all the interactions that are presented to them and the world. These human subjects determine how the interfaces have missed the mark in providing all the mechanisms for the desired transactions to succeed.

This is essential because the combined total of all those individual transactions, all those singular user decisions and actions drive success for any business or other entity, and therefore the entire world economy.

With the emergence of AI, the need for a UX intermediary might go away. The time may come when most user tasks are handed off to, managed, and completed by automated intelligent agents, instead of users.

Then the gap will disappear along with the need for any intermediary to close the gap because the two sides of the gap — the user and the experience — will disappear.

All those approaches to closing the gap that the UX professions have learned, perfected, and sold will no longer be needed: personas, journey maps, task analysis, benchmarking, and much more diminish in importance as the number of user-completed tasks declines.