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August 19, 2025
August 19, 2025
AI is an animating force in the realm of product creation, design, and business impact. It heralds a massive paradigm shift that still isn’t fully clear as we’re in the midst of it.
Such a seismic change offers all kinds of opportunities, including a re-invention of how our teams are formed and how we work together. What can researchers and designers do now to respond to the changes, while also approaching AI with critical thought and skepticism where needed?
This conversation is based on the report The AI Shift: Transforming How We Discover, Imagine, and Design. You can download the report, or watch a full recording of the webinar here.
Julie Norvaisas is the VP of User Experience at Dscout.
Gordon Ching is the Founder & CEO of Design Executive Council.
J.M. Downey is the Director of Design Strategy & Research at AT&T.
Dave Brown is most recently Head of Design, AI Services and Generative AI at AWS.
Gordon Ching:
We had three key research questions we really wanted to answer in this report:
Let’s discuss a framework around those roles that are blurring:
Our brains are here to connect those dots, ask better questions, and imagine those features.
J.M. Downey: I love the notion of only focusing on what brings you joy. I think it creates space for getting out of repetitive tasks that become energy and time sucks within our day-to-day, and hopefully creates space for strategic thinking. It's how we do more with less. That’s what all executives are interested in.
It's also about creating space to breathe and pause, which is so critical. If we are all strategists, engaged in this higher level, what good can we use design for? You can't force [intense strategic thinking] 8, 9, 10 hours a day, every day.
J.M. Downey: We've talked a long time about the democratization of research. We fought for a long time to have our seat at the table. With a lot of [new] tools, non-designers can now prompt our way to a working prototype. We can then have AI tools go and test it.
With great power comes great responsibility. It's continuing to be a part of that conversation to be a strategic lead, so that we don't let it run away without guardrails.
In my career, we talked about the three legged stool: product, design, and engineering. With this fourth node, AI, you've got six unique connections of how the different teams collaborate. The complexity of the amount of collaboration, how you organize, how you learn from each other, the way you run feature development and ideation to delivery—those things are up for grabs right now.
AI is coming for your task. There's a lot of noise out there on how AI is coming for your job and the idea that one job function will overtake all the others. You're seeing a lot more blurring lines, where designers can use tools like Subframe, or go directly into delivering front-end code.
This is a fascinating and exciting time. A lot of what we have held true as the way that you have to do feature development and product development is up for grabs. The future favors those who are willing to experiment and try new ways of working.
Julie Norvaisas: Historically, I’ve felt a little boxed in. I have to stay in my lane, do research, then hope relationships, storytelling, and persuasive techniques will have an impact.
Researchers don't have to think that way anymore. We can be more action oriented and more direct in applying insights and working with teams to unlock that.
We've also felt overwhelmed by processes. We can offload some of those tasks that don’t bring us joy. Experimenting with how to offload and automate [mundane] tasks is really exciting. That helps lead us to this more strategic influence. This is a moment for us to achieve that.
Gordon Ching: In the report it stated design and research teams must push beyond mere acceleration. It's not just about speed.
It’s also about AI unlocking more profound insights, ensuring solutions, and human needs. Janaki Kumar, Chief Design Officer for Global Banking at JP Morgan, emphasized intuition-led research and the human capacity to see around corners.
Dave Brown: The last couple of decades we've been building in this world of deterministic, rules-based software. Everyone could kind of stay in their lane. But the probabilistic nature of AI means that an application's runtime experience can significantly diverge from what we planned. We're moving from deterministic flows to probabilistic experiences.
We're moving from a single golden path to a world where every experience is an edge case. Our roles are shifting. You need to think much more at a platform level: how do you drive systems and be a systems thinker to manage all of that complexity?
Think about how things are adapting in real time. How do you personalize the experiences? How do you design experiences that remain resilient under stress? Where do you need to introduce friction to alert the user that this may not be the right path for them to go through?
For decades, the role of design has been to help simplify and reduce friction. These things are inverted in this world of probabilistic experiences.
A bit farther out, each of these experiences are going to be personalized at the individual level. The output from a researcher or designer is not a report or a study that informs what we build, but rather the very system itself.
The platforms need to mature for us to get there, but that's where I think things will be happening. Be careful what you ask for when you're fighting for the seat at the table. It's going to happen pretty quick. A designer or researcher, you can now actually influence and manage that system at scale. You're not reliant on science or engineering to do that, because the models are doing that.
“We're moving from a single golden path to a world where every experience is an edge case.”
Dave Brown
Head of Design, AI Services and Generative AI, AWS
J.M. Downey: Being held accountable to these KPIs is terrifying for a qual researcher. But I love the point that we have to get out of our swim lane. We've created the swim lane, but this allows us to explore faster as well.
We're able to get a lot closer to our product team, and we can explore 12 different paths at once. Now we're becoming that strategic partner.
Dave Brown: During my time at AWS, we launched a new service about two years ago called Amazon Bedrock. That was a zero to one brand new service and it's now over a billion dollars of revenue a year.
Through that time we launched hundreds of features and it was incredibly fast paced. When things are moving so quickly, I learned to pare back my instinct of wanting to go slower and make things more perfect. Instead, we've got to get something out there to market and really respond to customer needs.
It's critical that you have some good mechanisms in place already to get feedback from customers. That could be through all the great tools that Dscout provides. The future favors those who are very fast and responsive to building.
As a design leader, our roles are going to change. The cost of building a prototype, the cost of running a user research study, is going to dramatically fall. You're moving from this scarcity mindset to this mindset of abundance. How do you manage complexity, and how do you say yes to everything and still keep the wheels on the bus?
That's going to be a really tough transition for some people.
“The future favors those who are very fast and responsive to building.”
Dave Brown
Head of Design, AI Services and Generative AI, AWS
J.M. Downey: I also get a little excited that this is the renaissance of the design generalists. If we have those core skill sets, what can we do to operationalize, to influence, to help push the business forward, with that core skillset we bring as human-centered designers and researchers.
Julie Norvaisas: [This is also about] repositioning from insight to influence. Insights are transactional. Influence is a practice. Influence is a very difficult thing. You have to cultivate a practice of influence.
Dave Brown: What is your role? What is your purpose? What's your why? I think a lot of us got into this field because we believe deeply in this idea of building human connection.
I'm a little more flexible on what the specific tasks or tactical steps are and recognize that those are going to change over my career. You can anchor yourself on that north star of providing value to end users and to the business.
Julie Norvaisas: Experiment with how AI tools can help you bring more joy to that work, or spread the joy of that that you have.
J.M. Downey: There's the human element that we didn't talk about that's so critical to interpreting all of this. That is not going to be replaced. The judgment, the connections, the context. I champion being a generalist, but I don't forget the humanity. It's still critical to make the through line of all this.
The AI shift is going to dramatically change how we work—but it also brings a lot of opportunities for innovations, new challenges, and increased bandwidth for higher-level, strategic thinking.
Researchers and designers who are open to experimentation and new ways of working will find themselves better positioned to lead the pack.
At the end of the day, focus on your North Star: what is your purpose for being in the field? Even as the tasks and methods of executing on that change, it’s helpful to remember we’re still creating products for other people, which remains a constant.
