When Jakob Nielsen posted on LinkedIn earlier this year that superintelligence and AI agents would be the end of the user interface, he expressed a growing consensus among professionals in tech and design. Nielsen’s claim set off a conversation on the degree to which the user interface would survive and how UX design might shift in the coming years. Will navigation menus and quick links on card issuer websites survive this transformation? Will websites and mobile apps as we know them still exist?
Users Can Already Pay a Credit Card Bill with Perplexity’s Comet Browser
The recent arrival of Perplexity’s Comet browser and its already-there agentic capabilities make these questions even more urgent. While current card issuer sites perform normally in Comet, and effective navigation and menu design will remain vital for the foreseeable future, the browser’s agentic capabilities offer concrete evidence that changes are coming. In a recent session, we were able to have Comet’s agent successfully pay a credit card bill on Chase’s desktop site with minimal prompting and no confirmation prior to submission. From our Chase homepage, we asked the agent to pay our bill. It opened the payment slideout and only asked us one more question—the amount—before completing the task, though we had the option to prompt it further to change the date of payment and other variables. For a simpler test, we asked it on the homepage to open our most recent statement. While Chase’s site or limitations in Comet itself blocked it from opening a statement, it navigated to the Statements page and attempted to open the document, producing step-by-step instructions for how the user could access the statement when it was unable to do so.
Comet clearly still has limitations, but it is easier than ever to imagine a world in which Comet’s agent does not display Chase’s existing site while completing a payment or finding a statement. The fact that it still does raises a few important questions about agentic-focused design. The UI of Chase’s existing website establishes trust and provides feedback, ensuring users that this is, in fact, their card issuer and that their payment has gone through. Meanwhile, current navigation menus orient users on a website, show them what is possible on that site and allow them to indicate intent so the UI can narrow its focus (e.g., loading the payment journey or document center).
The Future of Agentic Capabilities and UI
Some users will prefer the familiarity of their desktop site or app regardless of advances in agentic capabilities. If agentic navigation comes to dominate, it will be because it begins with intent. Soon, users may perform all manner of tasks in a single chat window and simply tell the agent what they want. Card issuers who decide to allow agents to interact with their site—by no means a foregone conclusion—will have some work to do on the back end to make their APIs, data and metadata available in secure ways that facilitate agent activity. In terms of UI, the role of the interface will likely shift to surfacing only in key moments to serve the above purposes: orienting users, exposing what is possible, and providing trust and feedback.
The first two items on that list will likely take the form of summaries and explanations, conversational versions of basic chatbot prompts that appear in many card issuer VAs and that will appear instead in the chat window of whatever AI service the user engages with. These mirror what we already see from Comet. However, paragraphs of text can only go so far, and users—particularly new users—may need a stable entry point, while users unable to find what they are looking for through chat may ask to access a menu or something resembling the legacy interface. Trust plays a role here, too. Users may want to know they are accessing their card issuer’s website and surfacing that issuer’s branding, and UI may be the most efficient way to do so.
Virtual Assistants May Play a Role
What might this look like? An existing card issuer VA experience may hold one possible answer. For our October 2025 Desktop Payments report, we looked at payment capabilities within card issuer VAs. The credit card payment form is a classic example of a powerful UI—so much so that payment forms differ very little between issuers. Rather than try to improve on this design and overcome user concerns about trust and feedback, U.S. Bank elects to just surface parts of its payment form within the chat itself. We can picture something similar happening down the road in Comet or ChatGPT, with the card issuer UI appearing only for discrete tasks when orientation, trust and feedback are of the utmost importance. Navigation will largely take place on the back end, but optimized and even personalized menus will appear in the chat window at crucial moments in the user experience. Firms interested in planning for an agentic future may want to consider how to design a UI that can meet user needs in high-leverage moments within the context of the chat window.
This blog post was adapted from a recent Credit Card Monitor report. Subscribers can access the full report in the client portal. Interested in accessing the full report? Contact Corporate Insight here.
Neil FitzPatrick
Neil FitzPatrick is a senior analyst on CI's Bank, Credit Card and Lending research team.