Chat isn't the default interface

Unpopular opinion: a chat box is often a sign the design work hasn't been done yet.

Chat is great when the task is open-ended and the user knows what to ask. Most B2B workflows aren't like that. A finance team reconciling invoices or a recruiter screening candidates doesn't want to write prompts. They want the AI to do a known job inside the tool they already use.

In those cases, better interfaces usually look like:

• a button that runs a specific action on selected items
• suggestions inline, where the work happens
• a structured form that builds the prompt for them
• a document or canvas they edit together with the AI

Chat still earns its place as an escape hatch for the unexpected. But as the main interface, it pushes the hardest part of the job, figuring out what to ask, onto the user.

I saw a pre-AI version of this on Pro Telhanorte. Contractors buying in volume had to leave the store and talk to a sales rep to get a price or check their credit. The conversation was the interface, and it was the bottleneck: reps spent most of their day validating prices by hand. The fix wasn't a better conversation. It was tiered pricing that updates live with quantity, right on the product screen. A lot of AI chat boxes are that sales rep.

Where do you think chat is genuinely the best interface?