How Conversation Design Differs from Conversational UI
Understanding how both concepts come together can help you create better AI experiences.
Key Takeaways
Work is shifting toward closer collaboration between people and intelligent systems. More than ever, the quality of that collaboration depends on how clearly the technology communicates and supports users.
That’s where conversation design and conversational UI play distinct roles. Conversation design shapes the behavior of an AI agent across an entire interaction. It defines how the agent reasons, responds, maintains context, and reflects a consistent voice so the exchange feels coherent and genuinely helpful.
Conversational UI focuses on the interface where those exchanges happen. In places like Agentforce and Slack, people can type, speak, or tap to get answers, trigger actions, and surface data in a way that feels natural and efficient.
When these two elements come together, AI becomes easier to use and more dependable because clear dialogue meets an interface built for real work. Understanding the difference and how they complement each other is key to creating better AI experiences.
What we’ll cover:
Shaping how AI talks and thinks
Designing how AI shows up and collaborates
Why conversation design and conversational AI matter
Shaping how AI talks and thinks
Conversation design is the practice of shaping how humans and AI communicate. Think of it as UX design for dialogue. It focuses on flow, tone, and structure to create interactions that feel clear, helpful, and productive. At its core, it starts with understanding human communication patterns – how people expect conversations to flow, ask questions, and respond to guidance – and applying that understanding to how AI behaves.
At Salesforce, agent behavior is designed across four dimensions: persona and tone, reasoning logic, recoverability strategies, and prompt architecture. Strong conversation design ensures AI can anticipate needs, maintain context, and respond consistently. This is critical in high-trust contexts where clarity and reliability matter.
Conversation design lays the foundation for how AI talks, appears, and interacts in the workflow. By defining reasoning patterns, dialogue flows, and a consistent voice, it informs the design of the conversational UI, ensuring that the system acts and feels like a trusted collaborator.
Designing how AI shows up and collaborates
While conversation design shapes how AI thinks and communicates, conversational UI is the interface where AI’s intelligence becomes visible and usable. It defines the surfaces and interactions that let people communicate with AI, whether they’re typing, speaking, or selecting an option.
The heart of conversational UI is about creating the interfaces that meet people where they already are. It uses conversation as the primary way to navigate tasks, access information, and collaborate. These interfaces use natural language processing to understand language in context. This supports true two-way dialogue and remembers what’s been discussed. It also adapts across text, voice, and visual inputs so people can interact in whatever way feels most natural.
At Salesforce, these principles come to life through Agentforce in Slack. The interface brings AI into real-time team conversations, grounding responses in Slack context and Salesforce CRM data. Whether someone is asking a question, reviewing a recommendation, or triggering an action, the UI presents information in a way that aligns with how people already work together.
By combining awareness of context with easy interactions, conversational UI makes AI a dependable teammate that fits smoothly into daily work.
Why conversation design and conversational UI matter
Conversation design and conversational UI are most effective when they’re created together. This alignment is essential for building useful, human-centered AI.
Clear dialogue patterns paired with intuitive interfaces create interactions that feel supportive rather than disruptive. Users know what to expect, understand how to guide the AI, and trust that it will behave consistently from one moment to the next.
Bringing conversation design and conversational UI together doesn’t just improve user confidence, it directly shapes the effectiveness and reliability of AI systems. And as AI becomes easier to understand and collaborate with, organizations will see higher impact across workflows, customer engagement, and productivity.
