Why Swiping Will Replace Spreadsheets in the Boardroom

Every executive knows the feeling. It is 8 a.m. and there are already 47 things demanding a decision. Not big, strategic, career-defining choices, but a relentless stream of approvals, trade-offs, and "just need your input" requests that eat the day alive. Researchers call this decision fatigue: the more choices you make, the worse each subsequent decision gets.

Now add AI agents to the picture. Every major project management tool, from Microsoft Planner to Asana to Wrike, has launched AI agents in the past 18 months. These agents analyze risks, draft plans, triage issues, and generate recommendations. But they all deliver their output the same way: through chat windows and dashboards that demand yet more reading, typing, and cognitive overhead. The interface is the bottleneck.

There is a better pattern hiding in plain sight. The swipe, born in a dating app, has already proven it can compress complex evaluations into split-second decisions at extraordinary scale. The technology to connect AI agents with swipeable card interfaces now exists. The only thing missing is the product.

1. Swipe UX is psychologically proven for rapid decisions, but untested in enterprise AI.
   Card-based swipeable interfaces reduce cognitive load and compress complex choices into scannable units. Tinder processed over a billion daily swipes by 2014. Unilever applied the pattern to corporate idea evaluation in 2019. No current PM or executive tool uses it for AI agent interactions.
2. The technical foundation for agent-generated swipe interfaces already exists.
   Google's A2UI protocol, the AG-UI standard, and Vercel's AI SDK 6 all enable agents to compose interactive card and button components at runtime from trusted catalogs. The building blocks are ready.
3. Every major PM tool adopted AI agents in 2024 and 2025, but all chose chat interfaces.
   Microsoft, Asana, Wrike, and ClickUp all launched agentic features through conversational UX. None implemented swipe or card-based decision patterns.
4. C-suite AI adoption is broad but shallow, with a wide value gap.
   79% of companies use agentic AI, yet only 21% of CFOs report measurable value. 80% of organizations have encountered risky agent behaviors. The interface problem is a governance problem.
5. Decision fatigue costs organizations real productivity, and swipe UX is purpose-built to counter it.
   Knowledge workers spend 60% of their time on "work about work." Decision quality deteriorates through the day. Swipe interfaces turn laborious evaluation into something closer to instinct.
6. Workers want more control than technologists assume.
   Stanford research shows workers prefer higher human agency than experts think necessary on nearly half of all tasks. A swipe interface preserves human authority while removing friction.

The Accidental Invention That Solved a Universal Problem

In September 2012, Tinder co-founder Jonathan Badeen wiped a foggy bathroom mirror and saw his own reflection in the clear sliver. He coded a swipe gesture into the app without telling his team. By late 2013, Tinder was processing 350 million swipes per day. A year later, over a billion.

The gesture works because of three properties. First, card-based designs present small information snippets that allow rapid scanning. Each card is a mini decision point holding just enough context to act on. Second, swipe gestures demand almost no cognitive load; they feel closer to reflex than deliberation. Third, the mechanism is addictive because every swipe gathers information, turning evaluation into engagement.

The pattern quickly escaped dating. Estately's Flip app (2014) applied it to home buying. Sorce (2024) facilitated 7.5 million swipes for job matching. Offa uses it for off-market real estate deals.

AI Agents Can Now Build Their Own Interfaces

The infrastructure for agents to generate interactive, card-based interfaces matured rapidly in late 2025. Google's A2UI protocol (v0.8, December 2025) lets agents compose interfaces from a catalog of pre-approved UI components: cards, buttons, forms, all rendering natively across web, mobile, and desktop. The client maintains a trusted component catalog, and agents can only request components from that catalog, which solves the security question before it arises.

A Gemini Enterprise spokesperson captured the vision: "Our customers need their agents to do more than just answer questions; they need them to guide employees through complex workflows." This maps directly onto swipe-based decision-making, where agents compress analyses into approvable card units.

The complementary AG-UI protocol enables event-based communication between agentic frontends and backends. Vercel's AI SDK 6 (January 2026) introduced the Agent abstraction with explicit human-in-the-loop approval flows. Three patterns of generative UI have emerged: static (developer-controlled), declarative (shared control), and open-ended (agent-controlled). A swipe-based decision interface would use the declarative pattern, where agents propose structured card content within developer-defined templates.

The speed of development is striking. Thomson Reuters built CoCounsel, an AI assistant for attorneys, with just three developers in two months using Vercel's framework. Agent-driven decision interfaces are no longer a multi-year engineering project.

The Chat Interface Is the Wrong Answer

Every major PM vendor chose the same interaction pattern for their AI agents: chat. Microsoft's Project Manager agent takes goals, breaks them into tasks, and outputs to Loop pages. Asana AI Studio lets teams build no-code agents for workflow automation (Morningstar used it to compress a two-week project intake review into an automated process). Wrike's agents handle triage, intake, and risk at the space level. ClickUp offers Autopilot Agents for reporting.

The productivity numbers look good on paper. 90% of PMs report positive ROI from AI tools, and businesses see 15 to 20% cost reductions. IDC research suggests generative AI returns $3.70 per dollar invested.

But the adoption gap tells a different story. Only 21% of project managers use AI regularly. 49% have little to no AI experience. If nearly half of PMs cannot use these tools and 60% of their time goes to "work about work", the interface is failing them. A swipe interface that reduces agent interaction to approve, reject, or defer could collapse the learning curve entirely.

Asana's CEO Dan Rogers has argued that "autonomy is the wrong goal" for AI agents, advocating collaboration over full automation. Swipe fits this philosophy. It does not remove the human. It gives the human a faster way to stay in the loop.

The Boardroom Needs This More Than Anyone

Executive AI adoption is accelerating by every measure. 26% of organizations appointed a Chief AI Officer by 2025, up from 11% in 2023. 88% of executives plan to increase AI budgets because of agentic AI. Over 90% of Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft 365 Copilot.

The most vivid case comes from HPE. CFO Marie Myers described how an AI agent system called "Alfred" transformed their weekly executive review. A 100-slide deck that took all week to prepare became live insights delivered automatically, removing roughly 90% of manual preparation effort. Finance teams redirected saved time to forward-looking discussions.

Yet the value gap is wide. Only 21% of CFOs with active AI deployments report clear, measurable value. Only 14% have fully integrated agents into finance. Microsoft launched the Frontier Firm AI Initiative with Harvard specifically to teach C-suite leaders how to work with agents. The need for such a program underscores that executives are not fluent in agent-based workflows.

Stanford research finds workers prefer higher human agency than experts deem necessary on nearly half of all tasks. Top concerns: lack of trust (45%), fear of job replacement (23%), absence of human touch (16%). A swipe interface addresses all three. The human stays in control. The agent does the analysis. The gesture preserves authority while eliminating drudgery.

McKinsey's Jorge Amar described agentic AI as creating "a digital replica of the entire workforce." If agents are the new workforce, someone still needs to manage them. A swipe interface could serve as the approval layer between this digital workforce and human executives: fast, auditable, and impossible to ignore.