# What if apps and front ends no longer exist? > The age of ephemeral apps - **Author:** Gunnar Hopfe - **Date:** 02 / 2026 - **Reading time:** 4 min - **URL:** https://fse-group.de/en/thinktank/was-wenn-apps-und-frontends-gar-nicht-mehr-existieren We have been building software for energy companies for 15 years. The lion’s share of lifecycle cost went into maintenance, redesigns and regression tests of interfaces. At the same time the pressure to deliver context-relevant insight within seconds keeps rising. This is exactly where a new practice starts: ephemeral apps. In classic ERP landscapes a mundane task — a purchase requisition, a short-term production adjustment or an ad-hoc liquidity forecast — still means: pick the module, load the screen, fill the mandatory fields, start the approval paths. Soon the same sequence will begin completely differently: “250 ISO pressure sensors for plant 4, delivery week 38, budget 18,000 €; show me the impact on cash flow.” A single intent, whether typed, tapped, sent via API, from an email context or from a smartwatch. Within milliseconds a temporary interface materialises — perhaps as an AR overlay on the shop floor console, as a widget in the mail client or as a card fragment in the plant manager’s in-car display. It arrives with the relevant suppliers, price tiers, contract clauses, budget balances and approval steps already sorted, and can be finalised, commented on, delegated. Once the decision is made, the UI dissolves again. Order, booking, tracking and reporting continue invisibly. Front ends emerge situationally on every device, in every modality. They are appearances in the data moment, not permanent software artefacts. Large language model agents combine memory, planning and tool use. What emerges is an agentic experience (AX). A relationship, not an interface. ### Relationship instead of design For a decade and a half we at FSE have curated data streams for utilities, built role-specific dashboards, patched buttons, maintained design libraries. In doing so we implicitly assume a world in which people initiate and software reacts. That paradigm is tipping. Large language models with retrieval-augmented generation and tool use create views at the moment of need. Cognitive load drops because the system takes the initiative [Horvitz 1999]. What used to be called “personalization”, mostly colour-matched tiles, becomes an agentic experience (AX): relationship instead of screen. UX specialists do not become obsolete, but their craft shifts from pixel perfection to policy and behaviour design: which context may the agent use? Which audit trails are needed? Which feedback is explainable enough without overwhelming? That is tougher than signing off colour palettes — and more effective. ### The front-end fetish is so 2020 Why keep a one-way street alive when agents can combine data, roles and preferences situationally? UX in its classic form is a static snapshot; AX is a fluid conversation. That makes the incremental path of “one more button, one more report” economically pointless. The UI is disposable; data governance and agent safety are permanent. That saves front-end effort, speeds up time to insight and lowers abandonment rates [Koyuncu 2025; Bernhard 2024]. ### A strategic lever for energy IT - CAPEX: monolithic relaunches along the lines of “we are migrating to version X of the design system” disappear. - OPEX: maintenance teams shift capacity from UI bug fixes to data quality and model monitoring. A cost lever that quickly reaches seven-figure magnitudes at established utilities. - Lock-in & competitive advantage: whoever starts today to build AX-capable data and permission architectures creates a learning curve that is hard to copy. The actual IP moves from screens to policies and feedback loops [Agrawal 2024; Kobetz 2023]. - For decision-makers that means zero UI becomes the new hygiene factor. When competitors deliver context-relevant insight in seconds, a conventional dashboard looks like a fax machine next to a smartphone. ### From click dogma to a culture of dialogue Ephemeral apps are the economic consequence of available technology and rising time pressure, not futuristic luxury. LLMs can already generate dynamic GUIs today [Peterson 2023]; hybrid overlays with classic screens are transitional solutions [Ekenstam 2023]. ### Anyone thinking AX-first now secures three advantages: - Cost structure: less code surface, more value in data and models. - Speed: releases become continuous improvements rather than project phases. - Talent: specialists want to work on future-proof architectures, not on UI refactoring loops. Zero UI will become standard; the only question is when your competitor shows it. Decision-makers still planning UI roadmaps to 2030 today should allow one counter-question: what if apps no longer exist? #### Sources - Agrawal, S. (2024): The Next Big AI-UX Trend. - Bernhard, T. (2024): The Ephemeral Interface. - Ekenstam, L. (2023): The Post-GPT Software Era. - Horvitz, E. (1999): Principles of Mixed-Initiative Interaction. - Kobetz, M. (2023): Decoding The Future: Intelligent Interfaces. - Koyuncu, H. (2025): What If Apps Didn’t Exist? Meet Ephemeral UI. - Peterson, J. (2023): Dynamic, Ephemeral GUIs – Fighting Software Bloat.