I’m about as far from an “AI influencer” as it gets. But I’m passionate about HCI and building great products, so I do pay lots of attention to the shifts happening in how humans interact with them.

For decades, we’ve interacted with consumer apps through the familiar interfaces of websites and mobile apps. Power users might have tinkered with APIs, but most product and UX teams focused on the frontend, while everything else was just a backend thing to keep running.

When ChatGPT took over everyone’s browser tab in 2023, it made the classic web search feel clunky overnight. You type a search term, scan a bunch of links, click around, maybe end up back at square one. Quickly, people got used to ask for exactly what they need and get straight answers, and the only way that works is if there’s good, structured data somewhere underneath. If you run a consumer app and your business is all about owning or brokering data, you will be disrupted if you keep hiding that data behind your UI and call it a day. Enabling useres to find information in ways that fits their actual needs now means exposing well-structured data in a way that’s usable, both from inside your own stack and (where it makes sense) for third parties and AI agents.

Let me give you an example. I live in Austria, where there are two main platforms for real estate search, and I’ve used both to look for places to rent or buy at different points in my life. I’ve done the usual routine: enter some basic criteria, run a search, sign up for an email alert, and hope something relevant pops up. What these platforms don’t understand is that I want something close to both my family and my husband’s, with a good public transport connection, away from traffic noise and planes, not on a steep hill, and with a garden that gets evening sun. Instead, I get a couple of dropdowns and a lot of vague, poetic listing descriptions. Also, listings are duplicated between platforms, and the email alerts don’t help me keep track of what I’ve already seen, making the whole process slow and inefficient.

Now, imagine if these platforms exposed their data in a way that an AI agent could access and understand. I could just ask, “Show me all the new properties this month that are within 30 minutes of both sets of parents, face southwest, and fit my budget and space needs.” The platform that can answer that question wins, because it’s actually useful. Real estate agents will want to list there, because it connects them with serious buyers.

This is where the paradigm shift happens for product and UX teams. In the past, data structure was a backend concern. Now, it’s a UX concern. If your data isn’t structured in a way that AI agents can use, your product risks being left behind. Users will gravitate toward platforms where they can simply ask for what they want, and get it.

Exposing well-structured data becomes a core skill for product managers and designers. Designers need to think beyond what users see on the screen. Product managers need to anticipate new patterns of interaction and new ways of connecting users to information. Exposing structured data is now as fundamental as your web and mobile UI, and now’s the time to get comfortable with it.