Designing for 95% vs. 60% confidence

AI models aren't equally sure about everything. Most interfaces pretend they are.

Every answer gets the same font, the same layout, the same tone. So users end up trusting everything or nothing.

A few ways to design for uncertainty without showing a raw percentage nobody understands:

• Change the action, not just the label. Sure: apply it. Unsure: suggest it and ask.
• Show what it's based on. "Based on 2 of your documents" says more than "87% confident".
• Offer alternatives when it's unsure, instead of one confident-looking guess.
• Make "this is wrong" easy to say, and use that signal.

The hard part isn't the UI. It's getting a reliable confidence signal from engineering in the first place. That conversation should happen early, not after the screens are done.

A lesson from Pro Telhanorte applies here. Contractors' available credit first appeared as a discreet progress bar, and in a critique with Sales, Logistics and Engineering it became clear people missed it. We moved it to a persistent header with a plain "Available" label. Uncertainty works the same way: if it changes the user's decision, it can't be subtle.

How does your product handle answers the AI isn't sure about?