The Surface Count Is Falling
For most of computing’s history, software multiplied; every job got its own destination — an app, a site, a tool, each with its own interface to learn — until the home screen filled up and the browser tabs multiplied past counting.
Jakob’s Law existed precisely because there were so many surfaces, and users needed them to behave alike because a dropdown is a dropdown is a dropdown.
Assistants run the other direction, absorbing jobs into one place.
People now route work through whichever assistant they already have open — Anthropic Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, ChatGPT — instead of opening a different tool for each task.
It’s not only the standalone assistants, either because the chat tools people already live in have become conversational surfaces in their own right: Slack now runs AI agents directly in its channels, including third-party ones from Anthropic and others, and Microsoft Teams puts Copilot and its agents in the same window where coworkers talk.
Open-source projects push the same idea further: OpenClaw, a fast-growing self-hosted agent, drops a model of your choosing — Claude, GPT, Gemini — into whatever messaging app you already use, from Slack and Teams to Discord, WhatsApp, and Telegram.
The conversation people were already having with each other is now also where they talk to the software so the users don’t have to relearn it.
OpenAI lets third-party apps run inside ChatGPT itself, so you can search listings, build a deck, or pull up a playlist without leaving the conversation. Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol does the same work from the other side: it’s an open standard that connects an assistant to the systems where data and tools live, replacing a pile of one-off integrations with a single protocol. Claude reaches your calendar, your documents, and your issue tracker through that one connection.
The deeper shift is what the assistant does once it’s there.
It doesn’t just answer in one place — it goes out and does the interpreting. Claude Cowork takes a goal and works across your files and applications, synthesizing across many sources and handing back a finished deliverable, rather than answering one prompt at a time.
Point it at the work and it moves between the sources itself. The labor of visiting a dozen sites, reading each one, and piecing together what they mean — the exact cognitive cost Jakob’s Law set out to reduce — the agent now absorbs almost entirely. The user states the outcome; the interpreting happens out of view.
The labor of visiting a dozen sites, reading each one, and piecing together what they mean — the exact cognitive cost Jakob’s Law set out to reduce — the agent now absorbs almost entirely. The agent now packages the information for you, which is going to dramatically improve the enterprise experience once we get the APIs in place.
Put it together and the direction is clear. The number of surfaces in the world isn’t shrinking — software keeps multiplying as fast as ever; What’s falling is the number any one user touches directly, because the assistant has become the common surface and an agent increasingly does the cross-surface work the person used to do by hand.
We’ve watched a version of this before. The late-1990s web was a sprawl of directories and portals — Yahoo’s hand-built index of where to go. Then search collapsed all of that into a single box.
And sometimes the count drops to zero.
A surface doesn’t always shrink into the assistant — sometimes it never appears at all, because the work has gone ambient. An agent watching your inbox files the receipt, flags the renewal, and reschedules the meeting in the background, and the first you hear of it is a summary after the fact, if that.
There’s no screen to open and no conversation to start, so the interface Jakob’s Law was written about simply isn’t there — which is a harder design problem than a familiar screen, not an easier one.
Action items
- Map the journey across surfaces. Lay out the user’s end-to-end journey, then mark which steps now happen in an assistant, which still happen in your product, and where the handoffs fall. The handoffs are where expectations break and where your design work moves.
- Watch where tasks start. For a week, note when you reach for an assistant before the app you’d once have opened — your own behavior is the leading indicator for your users’, and sets expectations immediately.
- Stop counting screens and reducing clicks as wins. Retire the metrics that reward time-in-app and page views. If the assistant does the task, those numbers fall even when you’re winning.