AI changed how I design. Building with it changed what I design.
What started as faster prototyping became a shift toward products that do the work for people, not tools they have to operate.
Product Design · 29 July 2026
What started as a way to think faster, prototype quicker and explore ideas that would have taken days before, has ended up somewhere I didn't expect.
The more I built with AI, the more I realised the real opportunity wasn't just creating AI powered experiences. It was rethinking the product itself. Instead of designing tools for people to use, I became interested in designing products that could do more of the work for them.
From thinking faster to rethinking the product
At first it was purely a speed thing. An idea that would've taken days to prototype, days of back and forth with a developer just to see if it was even worth pursuing, could now be tested in an afternoon. That alone would've been enough to change how I work.
But speed wasn't the interesting part in the end. Once you can explore ten ideas instead of one, you start asking a different question. Not "how do I design this feature", but "does this even need to be a feature a person operates, or could the product just handle it for them."
That question is what's actually shifted my focus.
Tools that wait, products that work
Most software, if we're honest, is still built around waiting. It waits for you to open it, waits for you to know what to click, waits for you to do the actual work of getting from A to B.
The products I'm most interested in now don't wait. They pick things up before you've asked. A financial model platform I'm building at the moment doesn't just give someone a blank spreadsheet and a template, it starts building the model with them as they describe what they need. A CRM I've been shaping recently isn't just a place to log contacts, it's quietly doing the following up.
That's the difference between a tool and a product that works for you. One assumes you'll do the labour. The other assumes the labour is its job.
The crossroads of product, design and intelligent automation
This is where my focus actually sits today, at the crossroads of product, design and intelligent automation. Not purely a designer, not purely a technologist, somewhere in the middle where you have to understand both what a person needs and what a system is now capable of doing on their behalf.
It's a genuinely interesting place to work from. You're not just deciding how something looks or flows anymore, you're deciding how much of the work the product should quietly take on, and how much should stay visible and in the user's hands.
The principles that don't move
Here's what hasn't changed, and I don't think it ever will. Understand people. Reduce friction. Make complex things feel simple. Those are the core UX rules, and they're just as true now as they were before any of this existed.
What's changed is the scale of what "reducing friction" can actually mean. It used to mean fewer clicks, a clearer label, a shorter form. Now it can mean the form doesn't need to exist at all, because the product already knows enough to act.
Where this is heading
That's where I believe the next generation of product design is heading. Products doing far more of the work themselves, while the timeless design principles, understanding people, reducing friction, making things simple, stay exactly where they've always belonged. At the heart of everything.