Nothing is black or white. But we love going apocalyptic.
This is a great moment. If you're curious, if you want to learn new ways of working, to think about what design craft actually means right now, about how to avoid AI slop, this can be a great moment. I'm not a developer, but understanding a developer's work better motivates me. Suddenly I'm making a commit. Working directly with a front-end developer in the design system repo. I don't think I've ever felt things change this fast before. And I don't mean only how we use AI in our process. I mean how the experience changes inside an AI product: what happens when the interface stops being the center, or when the model's evals matter more than the interface itself for improving the experience, for example.
Curious and motivated, I guess.
But designers are also at risk, and here I include the different roles on a design team, not just the product designers.
For the last few years, part of my job has been building a team that sits in product strategy, and having a seat at the table myself, in a company, like so many others, with low design maturity. And now I see that work at risk, because AI is surfacing gaps that were already there, quietly hidden, gaps we hadn't fully solved. Building an interface has become easier and faster than ever, and many accept the result as "good enough." AI slop keeps growing without anyone stopping to think about the brand, about how we present ourselves to clients, about what it means for a product to be ours and not someone else's. And I see cases where moving faster translates directly into moving without UX/UI as part of the solution.
I read a Smashing Magazine article recently that names this exactly: AI doesn't replace designers, but it does remove the barriers that used to protect some designers while giving the good ones more autonomy. Design gets cheaper to produce, but judgment gets more valuable, not less. The problem is most organizations can't tell excellent design from merely acceptable design. They mistake "plausible design", an interface that looks coherent, for actual design thinking. And that's exactly one of the bigger risks.
The moment we all start looking the same, aligning, stopping to think, and accepting whatever the AI says, or a markdown nobody reviewed by hand, where does the difference go? The individuality, the innovation, the critical thinking?
It seems like nothing matters more than fast delivery. And that makes product managers and stakeholders push design back to the sidelines again, especially in companies where this was already happening without AI, or was starting to change, but deep down kept thinking the same way. I don't think they ever really understood what talking about user experience implies. It isn't something that belongs only to us. It's a layer every role should account for, whether they know a lot about design or not.
All of this brings me back to what I want to do as a professional. How I rethink my strategy as a lead, and my team's. It even makes me wonder if I want to fight this challenge as a manager or as an IC, because let's be honest, this is a great moment to be an IC. At the very least it's fascinating to watch the profession change, to see how we can propose changes, be part of the change in a product, and from there, part of something bigger.
And as a manager, the challenge I feel most right now is how to help each product designer and researcher on the team through this. We're all learning, and nobody has the magic formula for how to motivate people to try, explore, share. I won't deny it: it's been a rollercoaster.
At the individual and company level I see initiatives being taken, but I'm not sure we're getting the results we expect. Different speeds are starting to show. People who keep gaining knowledge, who try things, share them, propose changes. And people who fall behind, who no longer dare to ask certain questions, afraid they'll sound basic, or not knowing where to even start. I don't expect everyone to be an early adopter, because that never happens, I see it with product managers and engineers too. But we do need to figure out, together, how to get change that adds value in the short and long term.
Lately I've been having conversations with other professionals who sound more pessimistic than optimistic, and that's hard to sit with. But I ask myself why. Is it because they don't see the collaboration they expected inside product, or is it something else? Because that's what's actually demoralizing: there's no shared strategy, we're not asking ourselves what we're running faster for, what impact we actually expect.
There's a stat from a Microsoft study on critical thinking in knowledge workers that stuck with me, from the Design for Permanence article: between 55% and 79% of people using generative AI perceive less cognitive effort at work. The problem is that feeling of ease doesn't necessarily reflect real performance, it's what some call the "fluency illusion." From the same study, only 13% actually use AI to learn, in a virtuous circle. The rest use it out of fear of what happens if they don't, or because they already had their own quality standards, which, again, favors whoever was already senior over whoever is just starting. That's exactly the speed gap I see on my team.
Or, as Raúl Marín Calleja put it in a LinkedIn post sharing a report, an idea that sums up pretty well what I've been noticing for months: the more capable AI gets, the more certain human skills go up, not down. According to what he shares, creativity goes up and technical execution goes down. Knowing how to use AI won't be the differentiator, knowing how to judge it will be. Jobs don't necessarily disappear, but the tasks change, and continuous learning stops being optional. Problem solving, creativity, reasoning, and knowing how to interpret what AI produces are exactly the skills gaining weight. Someone else seeing it from a different angle, with data, helps.
The nervousness of having to learn things fast and apply them starting yesterday is real. The harder part is how we approach this change inside the product team, together, not each on our own.
Because in a moment when everyone can end up alone with their AI, working in silos, collaboration matters more than ever. Listening to other points of view. Thinking differently. Stopping to reflect. And yes, AI is there, a tool that can help us do specific tasks better and faster. But it doesn't replace our judgment. And it definitely doesn't replace the collective.
This is also a good moment for design to ask itself what it can improve, what better impact it can have on the business. After all, user experience has always been about user, business, and technology at once. And like in any system, when something changes, however small, it triggers other changes.
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