Shopify’s new chief design officer Carl Rivera believes that, in the very near future, the e-commerce platform’s user experience is going to feel like sci-fi and designers are at the center of it. His new position directly responds to industry skepticism about design’s relevance in an AI-driven landscape. “Imagine an interface where you can quickly shift between talking, typing, clicking, and even drawing to instruct software, like moving around a whiteboard in a dynamic conversation,” Carl Rivera says. An experience in which users are not presented with a barrage of nested menus, but with a blank canvas that invites creativity aided by an artificial intelligence that knows everything there is to know about online and brick-and-mortar retail and marketing. A fluid interface that adapts and anticipates your needs, automating tasks and recommending actions like the most brilliant partner you could dream of.