Thoughtworks Technology Podcast · Thoughtworks

Are we entering the 'age of intent' in digital interaction?

·45 min·2 clips

"No one wants to book a flight" — Sarah Tarapawala on why intent means booking a holiday, not components.

1. The Thoughtworks Technology Podcast episode examines Sarah Tarapawala's five-part Thoughtworks Insights series on the "age of intent," where users state goals to AI systems like ChatGPT instead of navigating forms. 2. Host Lily Ryan interviews Tarapawala, CTO of APAC at Thoughtworks, who built a prototype using OpenAI's Apps SDK and has been talking to clients about experimentation. 3. Tarapawala's thesis is that this stage is "the age of experimentation," and that businesses should be in it now because early entrants such as Zillow and Expedia, launch partners in ChatGPT, may gain discoverability advantages. 4. She describes her prototype, a flight exploration tool built with dummy data, an MCP server, React components and Codex, which she had working in half a day in both Java and Python versions. 5. Ryan and Tarapawala contrast SEO with what Tarapawala calls GEO, noting that no one yet knows how brands are discovered in ChatGPT, and that brands lose control of wording, language and context when text is synthesized. 6. Tarapawala shows how ChatGPT already combines listings, flood data, school rankings and Yelp coffee results in a house search, while Ryan points to hallucination and lawsuits over incorrect information about people. 7. Tarapawala expects retail and travel to move first as B2C cases, citing Shopify storefronts and her Tasmania itinerary for a family of five, where accommodation sold out before she could book. 8. She argues APIs built with mandatory fields like destination, departure city and date must be redesigned for conversation, and asks whether an MCP should run on an air-gapped data replica to limit harm. 9. Ryan, who works in cyber security, has mixed feelings about MCP's maturity but is cautiously optimistic that it moves toward the semantic web Tim Berners-Lee described in the early 2000s. 10. Product, architecture and digital strategy leaders curious about conversational commerce would get the most from this episode.

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