TL;DR: Open almost any serious application today and there’s a chat panel docked on the right. Microsoft, Notion, ElevenLabs, beehiiv, all in the same spot.
Similar screens, but the first message box is different. Let’s see what that means for a user, and for SaaS itself.
Black and blue screens. When I was starting my career, ERP was complex and anything but user-friendly, and customer services did magic purely from the keyboard, remembering the hot keys for each command. I still remember, early in my sales career, working with a customer service rep who could enter an order end to end with her eyes closed.
Everything on this screen had to be in someone’s head before they sat down.
Then the mouse, and the hot keys became menus you could read. Then cloud. And now AI, arriving as a window on the right.
The biggest player has settled where it goes. Microsoft cut the Copilot entry points in Word, Excel and PowerPoint down to one this spring, and in their own words it now opens the agent “in the chat pane on the right”. Notion, ElevenLabs and beehiiv sit in the same spot. This newsletter runs on beehiiv, so: a paying customer’s view.
The dashboard behind the panel is full of specifics: 36 conversations, average duration 1:58, what it all cost. The panel opens with “Hi! How can I help you today?”
The position is settled. What goes in it is not.
We’ve run this experiment before. Self-service BI put the data in everyone’s hands, and the charts were fine. We handed people a capability and assumed the skill came with it. The skill didn’t come. A regular operator isn’t used to analysing big data and turning it into actions every time they open a screen like that.
Now we’re doing it again, with a chat box.
Think of it as a kitchen with no menu. The chef can cook anything, which is useful if you can say “sea bass, no butter, on the bone” and useless if all you know is that you’re hungry. The menu was there to tell you what you could ask for.
Same panel, same position, three different first screens: an empty box, a greeting, and questions about the data already on the page.
beehiiv is the middle one. I rate it and pay for it, and that first screen is still half-way there. So I typed what I had in mind instead.
The three follow-ups were generated, not written by me. That’s the menu arriving late, but arriving.
Click-through rate on that article. What made it perform. How it compares to last month. Those are the three questions I was going to ask next. Wouldn’t you click one, in my shoes?
So here’s the test. Open the next AI panel cold, before the demo, and read what it offers before you type. Questions matching your interest mean someone worked out your job. An empty box and a hello means it got added for a roadmap. And if you’re building a solution, don’t just add a chat. Back it with a couple of thought-provoking questions that guide a user into a dialogue worth having.
To sum up
I don’t think the chat itself will swallow the left-hand side. Text alone isn’t how we take things in, we prefer tables and charts. I expect the agent on the right to end up driving what’s on the left for majority of software, rather than replacing it.
That’s my bet. Let’s see in 3-5 years how it went.
P.S. The article beehiiv picked out in that screenshot is this one, in case you missed it.