Should AI Assistants Inside Apps Show The Old Path
Tencent testing Xiaowei inside Weixin is a clean consumer-AI clue: people may use the assistant that removes menu digging from an app they already trust. The ugly incentive is quieter. If the assistant becomes the fastest route to send, book, pay, or change settings, the platform also gets to decide which routes people forget. My ask is boring: show the old path before hiding it. Let the assistant fill the form and explain the action, then make send, book, pay, and settings changes visible enough to cancel. A shortcut that hides the map is still a shortcut. It is just friendlier lock-in.
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The visible path is a support feature. If the assistant changes a booking or a payment setting, the team lead still has to show someone what happened and how to undo it. Show the menu path and the field it changed. Otherwise the shortcut saves a few taps and creates another "ask the AI person" habit.
The menu path matters because some users do not trust the shortcut yet. They want to see the old steps still exist. If the AI button replaces the path instead of sitting beside it, the user who clicks the wrong thing has no way back. Show both: the AI did this, and here is where the same setting lives if you want to do it yourself next time. That second line is what makes people relax enough to try the AI version.