Major enterprise software companies are rushing to roll out so-called headless software platforms that can be used not by people but by AI agents.

Because headless software is not meant for humans, it is characterised by the absence of the software user interface that people are familiar with. Some have even started talking about the "death of the UI", but that is getting ahead of things at this point. Even if AI agents spread, people will keep using software, and in software used by people, a human-facing UI will inevitably continue to exist, a more realistic view holds.

Even if it does not disappear, will software UI keep the same form it has today? Not likely, according to Inswave CTO Wook-rae Kim (김욱래), whose specialty is enterprise UI. He expects many changes in the UI of software used by people because of AI.

In the enterprise UI market, change is not an issue that suddenly emerged because of AI. Long before generative AI represented by ChatGPT appeared, the enterprise UI field has continued to evolve beyond simply adding UI toward providing solutions that help business. AI-driven change can be seen as an extension of that trend.

Still, Kim stressed that the impact of AI will be far greater in terms of the intensity of change, and that the industry must respond more aggressively. Inswave is also speeding up efforts to overhaul its strategy and tactics around AI.

According to him, the card Inswave has pulled can be roughly summarised as follows.

First is to provide a platform that makes AI-assisted development easier and safer in enterprise environments.

Inswave has grown on a platform that helps companies develop internal system UIs. As a result, the rapid spread of coding AI in enterprise workplaces is bound to be a weighty and sensitive issue. It could choose to compete with its own coding AI under an "eye for an eye" strategy, but given that the coding AI arena has become a battleground among major players backed by financial clout, an in-house coding AI card is unlikely to have a high chance of success.

The card Inswave pulled, taking into account both its specialty and reality, is Enterprise SDD (Spec-Driven Development). The core is to provide an environment in which companies can use a variety of coding AI tools safely.

Kim said, "In enterprise environments, it is important to create a system where people can verify and take responsibility when deploying code to a real environment. Enterprise SDD includes Inswave’s own coding tools, and it can also use external tools such as Cursor or Amazon Kiro. The key in Enterprise SDD is the tools and frameworks that can check whether code created with coding AI can be deployed."

For Enterprise SDD, Inswave is focusing on supporting the easy creation of specification documents used for generative AI. Kim said, "It may be because it has not been in the spotlight for long, but there are not as many major players in this field as you might think, so it is a fight worth taking on," adding, "We conducted proof-of-concept tests for Enterprise SSD with several customers and will officially launch in June."

Inswave’s Enterprise SSD platform is closer to a general-purpose application development tool than a UI development tool. Attention is on whether it can serve as a foothold for Inswave to expand its base in the enterprise market beyond UI.

Kim also sees UI that AI agents can use as important. Kim said, "We need a UI that lets people see what AI agents are doing. For that, existing UIs also need to change to be AI-friendly," adding, "Inswave provides the underlying element technologies related to this, and customers use them to build UIs themselves."

The final card is still largely conceptual. In summary, it is real-time UI, a scenario in which UI is generated in real time to fit a user’s situation.

At a solution seminar it held recently, Inswave also demonstrated a scenario in which AI, starting from a blank screen and using only a customer information lookup, generated a new UI in real time, including plan recommendations, after going through governance and audit procedures. Kim said, "As UI evolves in this direction, we will support a platform that can implement real-time UI with a structure that enables verification and explanation."