Salesforce has gone headless : a sales person can update their deal sheet without ever logging into salesforce.com through AI. Many companies are following suit with MCPs. English as an interface to complex systems is a tremendous innovation.
And yet, some of the most sophisticated thinkers in AI are pushing more than markdown text, a format AI & computer systems use. These thinkers espouse richer UIs :
“Imagine using iMessage to do everything, when in fact every other app has a unique interface…With e-commerce, you want a very rich user interface.” -
[Brian Chesky], CEO of AirBNB “I want richer visualizations, color, and diagrams and I want to be able to share them easily,” he adds. “I’ve started preferring HTML as an output format instead of Markdown and increasingly see this being used by others on the Claude Code team, this is why.” —
[Thariq Shihipar, Claude Code engineer] AI enables us to dynamically create UIs whenever we need them built for purpose. Custom-tailored to vacation shopping, CRM updating, or terminal typing, whatever the recipient’s preference might be.
Headless systems don’t decapitate the system ; they enable many user interfaces.
On the go? How about an audio summary of your email? Reviewing marketing copy? Interactive web app. Planning expenses for next year? Interactive spreadsheet with charts.
Software systems need to decide which of these to keep over time & which are disposable ; those newer semi-permanent artifacts will become the new heads - yes, there will be many - & they’ll evolve as business does.
This dynamic UI management is the future of software value : the harness to control the interface/ensure it’s correct & the knowledge management to rationalize all the AI products over time as a context database & library of artifacts.
The user interface, the head isn’t disappearing, it’s become plastic, malleable to the interface a user needs when they need it. There’s a great future in plastics.