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When it comes to building software, companies face a perpetual balancing act. There are the needs of developers, who look for speed and efficiency, code quality and scalability. There are also the needs of users, who focus on features and functionality and prioritize usability and bug fixings in a constant search for ever better customer experience. Maintaining that balance can present significant challenges. For example, developers may build in strict security policies such as passwords, and two-factor authentication, while users want quick access and minimal friction.
Software companies must manage these tensions. They need to keep pace with customer demand – unrelenting in a world where consumer software is ubiquitous – and balance that with considerations of budget and technical feasibility that constrain developers’ scope to respond.
Intelligent Choice Architectures (ICAs) offer a way to balance the complex, sometimes conflicting, demands of architecture, compliance, features, and costs.
ICAs are AI-powered systems designed to improve decision-making. Beyond a simple nudge to individual decision makers, ICAs are designed to reshape the entire decision environment to accelerate better outcomes across the enterprise. They do this by introducing better choices and changing the way decision rights are allocated.
ICAs combine the expertise of human developers with the computational power of AI. Routine tasks that developers must complete such as requirement analysis, testing, debugging and documentation can now be automated. This gives developers bandwidth to spend time on higher-value work.
Traditional decision making has been about finding optimal solutions – ‘what is the best thing to do?’ Since software development requires managing trade-offs such as security versus agility, scalability versus customization, and modernization versus innovation, there may not be one single answer. ICAs let business consider multiple routes to achieve their goals by showing decision makers a broader range of better options and the compromises that each would entail.
ICAs watch and learn so that the overall health of the decision-making environment can improve over time. Decision-making becomes a corporate superpower. Better decisions are a source of competitive advantage.
Our recent research, conducted in collaboration with MIT Sloan Management Review, looks at the deployment of ICAs across a wide range of industries as the cornerstone of human-centric AI.
ICAs can:
Developers tend to use complex technical language and plenty of jargon in their work, particularly when communicating with other technical folks. Other people use very different communication styles and language codes to explain what they want or how they interact with technology. Lack of a common language can lead to miscommunications and mismatched expectations.
ICAs are one way in which this gap can be bridged. They can be taught to use language that all parties will recognize and agree on, thereby increasing decision transparency between developers, product managers, and executives.
Given that we are acclimatized to intuitive interfaces via our smartphones, TVs, cars, and home appliances, users have come to expect the same speed and responsiveness from all our software interactions. While consumer tech can live by the Silicon Valley motto of ‘move fast and break things’ enterprise tech is much more constrained by regulation, security concerns and data protection. The constraints are particularly tight in industries such as finance, healthcare, and defense.
This is yet another area of tension between resource-constrained developers and users with high, sometimes unrealistic expectations. The power of ICAs to manage trade-offs, show more than a single best-case solution, and map multiple scenarios becomes a competitive advantage.
There are several ways in which the business can measure the impact of ICAs. These can be tailored to meet the needs of individual companies, but relevant metrics may include:
ICAs which combine the power of predictive, generative, and agentic AI, don’t replace human developers. They augment their skills. Similarly, software development isn’t an end in itself but a set of complex tasks that serve a human purpose. ICAs are a way of ensuring that the human factor isn’t lost and that the needs and expectations of end users remain visible throughout the development process.