Context
- Prism Central: AWS for your own infrastructure, built on 2014-era patterns
- Generative UI collapsed the gap between intent and execution
- A chat panel is a wall of text; admin problems need affordances
Prism Central is Nutanix's flagship control plane for commanding and controlling data centers. Think AWS, but for your own infrastructure.
It has been built on traditional enterprise patterns since 2014, and it carries a decade of accumulated conventions. Meanwhile, generative UI was changing what people expect from software. The loop from intent to execution was collapsing everywhere, except in products like ours, where getting something done still meant discovery, navigation, and learning steps.
The obvious move was to bolt a chat panel onto the side and call it done. But chat is a wall of text, and our users' problems are not:
"As an IT admin, I want to analyze why my VM is running slow so I can take the right steps to resolve it."
No paragraph of prose gives that admin what the task needs: charts, related entities, comparisons, actions. We had to rethink what kind of intervention actually fit.