AI Speeds the How, Design Protects the Why

A senior product designer’s perspective on AI adoption: what sped up, what broke, and how design keeps clarity and culture intact.

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When AI first crept into our workflows colleagues used it in secret, checking ideas and drafting messages, but few admitted it. Then the tone of messages in Slack shifted. Questions changed. Soon after, AI features appeared in the tools we already relied on, and the conversation moved from avoidance to integration.

Designers embraced it quickly. Engineers were more cautious, sometimes hesitant, sometimes resentful. That gap has been one of the most revealing dynamics of this shift.

My focus has not been personal adoption alone. I’ve worked alongside the team to shape how we use AI in practice.

What AI Actually Changed

AI has not rewritten collaboration, but it has changed the texture of it.

For me, AI became a touchpoint for:

  • validating whether I’d missed something in a flow;

  • surfacing broader ideas when I felt stuck;

  • drafting fast prototypes with interaction and more explicit handovers.

This is the practice shift: treat AI like a junior teammate, use it to explore, draft and test, and keep accountability with people.

The result is faster cycles and sharper deliveries in some areas. There is also a risk. If we let the tool mediate too much, person-to-person conversation fades, and that is bad for our brains.

Shifts in Technical Teams

Ironically, engineers could benefit most from AI’s scaffolding and validation, yet many still appear to resist it. At times, I used AI to sense-check engineering feasibility. This occasionally shifted the conversation and revealed dynamics we might not have noticed otherwise.

Prototypes are the meeting room again;
AI accelerates them.

AI has been useful in surfacing risks or unconsidered paths. It has also highlighted gaps in ownership: designers looked proactive, engineers seemed hesitant.

The Human Dimension

AI did not just change process. It changed trust.

Product Designers began asking why engineers were not embracing it. Engineers sometimes resented that designers were. The result was tension over contribution and accountability.

For me, AI is not an oracle but a teammate. I use it conversationally, probing, suggesting, testing. That judgement, shaped by multi-faceted experience, is one of design’s enduring contributions.

Use AI as a teammate,
keep judgement as your edge.

Where Design Adds Value

As John Maeda notes, design in tech is as much culture as craft. Don Norman reminds us speed must stay human-centred. In my practice, I work at both levels: nudging culture through how we work, and raising craft in what we ship.

Design’s role is to balance the equation:

  • validate AI outputs before shipping;

  • keep people talking, not just prompting;

  • protect creativity and mental health in a workflow that risks becoming transactional.

AI helps us ship faster; design ensures we ship the right things, in the right way. My role is to support clarity and to encourage the conversations that only humans can have.

These reflections come directly from projects where I designed notification systems and stock or WMS tooling, along with my ongoing work on reporting. See Selected Work for outcomes and decisions.

The challenge is making sure that in speeding up the how, we don’t lose sight of the why.

These reflections are observations from practice, and I expect them to keep evolving as AI does. Shared with design leaders, hiring managers, and anyone exploring how teams adapt to AI.