Agentic UIs, copilots, and the AGUI protocol with Atai Barkai

“We’re entering the golden age of AI. It’s like Steve Jobs’ bicycle for the mind — the power still comes from you, but it amplifies you by a lot.” — Atai Barkai

Copilots aren’t just another chatbot bolted onto SaaS apps — they’re intent-oriented interfaces that bring humans and AI into the same workflow. In this episode, Atai, Barkai, co-founder of CopilotKit, shares the journey from an LLM media database pivot to building one of the most popular open-source frameworks for production-grade copilots.

You’ll learn:

• Why copilots ≠ agents — and why the human-in-the-loop is essential
• How chat + generative UI is reshaping SaaS UX beyond text-only interfaces
• The role of AGUI, a new open standard for agent-user interaction
• Why observability, analytics, and guardrails matter more than model quality alone
• How reinforcement learning from real users could turn every SaaS product into its own training pipeline