It would seem that every day, AI-powered software has appeared out of nowhere and is the mainstay of the future of business. The future of major software companies depends wholly on whether they choose to adapt and evolve by integrating AI tooling into their products. It’s becoming clearer every day that the companies who fail to do so will become obsolete in just a few short years. In this new age of how consumers interact with AI, digital technologists are asking themselves this question: Will AI impact how digital products are designed?
For years interface designers have looked to companies like Apple, Stripe, and Airbnb for design cues. Now, the world has become far more familiar with a new type of interface. Products like ChatGPT and Perplexity are designed to give the user anything they need instantaneously. These interfaces stand to outshine, and perhaps outlive the more historic way of gaining information, namely from Google.
Kyle Reid, the Senior Vice President of Design and Technology at StoryBrand, witnessed this shift occurring, and began to think differently about how to leverage AI to enhance his UI/UX work and reshape how products should be structured. “It’s no longer a technological challenge, but a design challenge.” Reid says. “Simplicity beats complexity when we look at how people interact with UI, but quality will always win out in the end.”
Designing Smarter AI Tools
Search and discovery tools like ChatGPT have accomplished quite a feat by simplifying an extremely complex system into a seemingly simple interface. Yet the simplest interface in the world can’t account for bad user inputs. College courses could be created to help users understand how to write quality AI prompts to make discovery tools more helpful and useful. But Kyle Reid decided to approach this complex issue from another perspective: design.
With over a decade and a half of experience working at companies like StoryBrand, Coach Builder, and Business Made Simple, Kyle has built products that have helped over 1 million business leaders “clarify their message” by using the StoryBrand 7-part Messaging Framework. The results have been clear. When people use StoryBrand, their businesses grow. But could this framework be more effective? This is what Kyle Reid and his team began to ask themselves when they recognized how those who used StoryBrand weren’t sure if they were being effective unless someone well versed in their framework was affirming their efforts. They sought to build a tool that would provide high quality marketing collateral with the use of AI trained in the StoryBrand framework.
“As new technology evolves, design decisions are being made by allowing the technology to dictate the interface.” Kyle says. “In the case of most AI interfaces, this negatively impacts the end-user. Although the design is simple and easy to use, it allows the end-user to unknowingly self-sabotage, especially when the output quality is heavily reliant on the input.”
Enter StoryBrand.ai
As a solution to this problem, in January of 2025, Kyle and the StoryBrand team launched StoryBrand.ai. Reid says, “Design is about solving problems.”
“Growing a business is no small affair. Just for starters, e-mails need to be written, social media posts need to be drafted, and landing pages must be created. The process is overwhelming and daunting, and it feels like you’re doing an enormous amount of work, all the while hoping you’re doing it right.”
Kyle Reid and his team saw an opportunity to eliminate poor quality AI generated content by building a design-focused user flow that collects the right information from the user to help build the perfect AI prompt. This process has all but prevented the “garbage-in garbage-out” experience most of us have with unguided AI chat tools. Additionally, StoryBrand.ai is trained to follow the proven framework of StoryBrand. Just as importantly, a clean and clear UI/UX was designed to support first time and power users equally.
Proven Results and Positive Impact
The result? Over 200,000 pieces of content generated in a few short months, rave reviews from customers, healthy retention and usage numbers, and a signup rate far exceeding expectations.
StoryBrand.ai asks the right questions to ensure the user’s messaging is clear, compelling, and consistent across every asset they create. The result is engaging content that is true to their brand—without the hours of effort. In launching StoryBrand.ai, Kyle and his team built a user experience that elevates quality but doesn’t sacrifice user simplicity.
What’s the future of AI? Kyle Reid believes it lies in design-focused thinking, simplicity, and asking the right questions. The results suggest he’s on the right track.