AI and Design: A Revolution Challenging Certainties

A Disruption in the Design World

Eight months ago, questions began to emerge in meetings where I wasn’t supposed to be paying attention. Questions like, “Can’t we just ask Figma AI to do it?” or “If AI can generate screens, why are we still hiring?” started to circulate. As the head of design for a global technology platform dedicated to restaurants, and having built design teams at Walmart and Capital One, I have spent years advocating for the importance of design. Yet, these questions, though painful, are not entirely unfounded.

For the past eight months, I have faced variations of the same question. It hurts. But here’s what no one wants to say out loud: they are not entirely wrong to ask. Not because design doesn’t matter. But because, for much of the last decade, a significant portion of what design teams were actually producing—what designers were hired, evaluated, and promoted for—was exactly the kind of work that AI can now do faster, cheaper, and without a Slack message.

We created the conditions for this. We just didn’t think we were building a trap.

The Responsibility of Designers in This Transition

Design has created the conditions for its own displacement since the 2010s, when design thinking saw a major rise. By the time I joined my first corporate job, I was inheriting the wreckage of that rise—corporate hallways that viewed design thinking as a workshop rather than a means to shape the industry.

Design grew. Teams of ten became teams of hundreds. Salaries doubled. Organizational charts brought design closer to upper management, and it seemed, from the outside, that design had finally found its place. We had seats at tables from which we had been excluded for years.

But what was actually happening was narrower than that. Design was growing to support agile delivery. Every product team needed a designer. Every designer had to keep engineers unblocked. The greatest professional sin was being the bottleneck—the person who slowed down the sprint, the one whose work wasn’t ready, the designer who wanted to do more research before the product launched.

So we became fast. Really fast. We learned to produce screens quickly, consistently, and in volume. We built design systems so that no one had to make decisions twice. We shipped. We hit our speed goals. We were promoted for it.

And while all this was happening, something else quietly left the building. Not design. Design was everywhere. I’m talking about the part of design that cannot be standardized: the judgment that examines a brief before a line of code is written and says this is going to fail, and here’s how. The instinct that keeps an entire system in your head while everyone else is looking at the functionality in front of them. The willingness to say the uncomfortable thing in the room where the decision is actually made.

These capabilities didn’t disappear because organizations stopped valuing them. They atrophied because we stopped practicing them. We were too busy shipping to develop the skills that would have made shipping meaningful.

Peter Merholtz recently wrote what many of us in design leadership think but dare not say out loud: design hasn’t lost its strategic place because organizations took it away. Design traded it—gradually, for salary scales, delivery speed, and the comfortable feeling of being necessary, until that was no longer the case. He’s right. I have been a design executive for over a decade at Walmart, Capital One, and now Byte by Yum!, and I have seen design leaders—including myself—make this trade without fully examining what we were giving up.

The Impact of AI on Design

AI first automates what has the least value. For design, that was user interface (UI). Not because UI is easy. It’s not. But because it is repeatable. Learnable. Describable enough to train a model. The things that made a designer valuable within an agile team—the ability to produce good enough material quickly, consistently, without slowing down the sprint—are exactly the things that translate easily into a command.

The problem is that a significant number of designers have built their entire professional identity around this speed. Not because they were lazy. But because they were rewarded for it. Speed was the metric. Shipped screens were the proof of value. The designer who could produce ten high-fidelity mockups by Thursday was the one who got promoted, who received the raise, who was designated as the example. We built a profession that selected for output and then were surprised when output was automated.

I have observed this from the inside. I have attended performance reviews where the conversation was entirely about delivery. How many products did the team touch? How quickly did designs move to handoff? Was the design system used consistently enough to speed up the next sprint? Rarely did anyone ask: did we design the right thing? Did we anticipate what was coming before it shipped? Did we prevent anything?

We had no language for prevention. We had a language for production.

So when AI arrived and production became cheap, many designers did the only thing they knew how to do: they became faster. They learned the new tools. They optimized their commands. They competed on the dimension that was being commoditized.

That’s the wrong bet.

AI didn’t expose a weakness in design. It exposed a lie we told ourselves to survive.

For thirty years, the field has said the same thing in every executive briefing, every conference keynote, every recruiting conversation where we tried to justify the budget: design is not how something looks. It’s how something works.

We believed it. And we couldn’t fully prove it either, because the interface was always in our way.

The screen was the only thing that made the invisible visible. You couldn’t show a CEO how a system worked without first showing them what it looked like. You couldn’t align engineers on a concept without mocking it up. You couldn’t make stakeholders feel the experience without rendering it. So we rendered it. Constantly. We spent the majority of our professional hours producing the visual proof of a thought that lived somewhere deeper—because without the visual, no one could see the thought.

AI has simply made that part cheap.

And what is becoming clear, now that the scaffolding is gone, is that for many people who called themselves designers—the scaffolding was the only skill the job ever required them to develop.

Reevaluating the Value of Design

I want to be precise here, as this is not an argument that UI is easy or that those who do it well are in any way inferior. UI is hard. Doing it well requires a depth of skill that takes years to build—visual hierarchy, interaction logic, accessibility, the thousand little decisions that make something easy to use. That work matters. It has always mattered. But UI is the layer of translation, not the thing itself.

What the last decade has done, in its rush for speed, has been to quietly stop rewarding everything else. The work became: be fast at the main thing. Ship. Repeat. The T-shaped form that design education advocated has flattened into a single vertical line.

But if you have spent the last decade learning to show the work without learning to do the work—if the mockup was the thought and not the artifact of the thought—then what AI has taken from you was not a tool.

It was the thing behind which you were hiding.

I’m not saying this to be cruel. I’m saying it because I have stood in front of talented, hardworking designers who are genuinely terrified right now, and the fear is specific. It’s not that my tools are changing. It’s that I don’t know who I am without the tools.

That’s the question the field must answer.

A New Era for Design

The market is reevaluating the value of design.

This is not a story about AI eliminating design. It’s a story about companies being forced to change what they optimize—and design must change with that. Right now, in most organizations, optimization revolves around speed, risk reduction, margin, and adaptability. The ability to move quickly without breaking things that cost a fortune to fix later.

In this environment, some work gets automated first. Not because it’s unimportant—but because it’s describable. Repeatable. Trainable. Production work. Visual execution. Large-scale variations. Application of templates. The things designers used to spend 40 to 50% of their time on.

That work is now cheap. Which means competing on that makes you cheap.

When anyone can generate twenty concepts in ten minutes, concept generation is no longer premium. When any product manager can mock up a flow before the meeting, fidelity is no longer proof of expertise. When the tool does the production, the person using the tool is a burden.

What becomes rare—and rarity is where the leverage lies—is judgment.

What to pursue. What to kill. What not to build at all. When moving quickly and when going fast is the most costly decision in the room. How to approach a brief that says “use AI to enhance trust” when no one in the room can define trust, and still move the work forward.

That kind of judgment cannot be asked for. It cannot be standardized. It does not become cheaper as models improve.

And it resides in four specific skills that design has always claimed to value—and largely underdeveloped.

• Tolerance for Ambiguity. The brief is incomplete. Stakeholders disagree. The problem is not yet defined enough to be solved. You move forward anyway—not recklessly, but deliberately. You define the thing that no one else wanted to define.