When design meets AI

For years, design focused on creating experiences for people. Today we also design experiences where people and AI systems work together.

Beyond creation

AI is powerful as a creative tool, but its biggest impact lies elsewhere: redesigning processes.

One example. A team reviewed the status of 200 client cases twice a week, manually. By automating that monitoring with AI, we went from a weekly review to daily monitoring, eliminating about 14 hours of repetitive work every week.

The team didn’t lose their work: they got it back. They could focus on higher-value tasks.

Where to look for opportunities

Here are three questions I use to identify where AI can help:

1. What task is repetitive? If it’s done the same way every time, it’s a candidate for automation.
2. What information is scattered? If you’re constantly connecting data from several tools, an AI workflow can unify it.
3. What decision depends on analyzing a lot of text or data? That’s where AI speeds up analysis.

Design matters more than ever

Automating a poorly designed process only produces faster inefficiency. That’s why the designer’s role is key: understand the problem, map the flow, and then use technology to improve it.

AI doesn’t replace design. It amplifies it.