Key Takeaways
- Design leaders are focused on safeguarding human-led design principles, even as AI accelerates workflows, and stakeholders push for faster results. Thoughtful human inputs remain critical to creating meaningful, ethical, and impactful solutions.
- Shifting business priorities, rapid tech advancements, and AI's growing influence are overwhelming Design Teams. Leaders are carving out space for meaningful, high-impact work to combat burnout and showcase design's value.
- After years of experimenting with AI, design leaders are now focused on turning insights into measurable outcomes. By applying rigor, OKRs, and commercial focus, they aim to demonstrate how AI can complement human-centered design strategies.
- Design leaders are evolving their roles to align with business strategy, ensuring design remains a vital driver of success. They are leveraging disruption as an opportunity to solidify their impact.
Listen: How design leaders are reclaiming their strategic value.
There’s simply no arguing that the past two years have disrupted the design function inside organizations. Sweeping layoffs of entire Design Teams, elimination of senior leadership roles, and an unquenchable thirst for tech solutions that promise to solve complex human problems, have all eroded trust. Fear, worry, and fatigue have halted progress across the entire field.
Reaction to these developments has led to deep conversations among senior design leaders in our InsideOut Community. We’re excited to report that this year these leaders are driven to find a path forward, as they shared in our annual Top Priorities sessions.
At the top of this list, preserving the integrity of design methods when AI is setting the pace of delivery, cutting through the noise to deliver truly impactful work, and transitioning AI from the experimental phase into real-world applications ranked highest. Let’s dig deeper into each.
Preserving design integrity when AI sets the pace
Design has long been confused with visual output, with little understanding or regard for the behind-the-curtain rigor required to create the seamless experiences that lead to results. So it’s not surprising that business stakeholders believe that generative AI can simply “whip something up” that’s faster and equally effective.
But every Designer knows that thoughtful, human-led input—not just output—matters most. Sure, AI can help with research by processing data at lightning speed, but even then, a misguided human prompt can derail the intended results. Yet the proven design principles that fueled outsized revenue growth in McKinsey’s 2018 Business Value of Design report are now frequently seen as time-consuming and unnecessary.
This year, design leaders intend to cement the role of design within business transformation while keeping well-established principles intact.
As companies invest heavily in artificial intelligence, their patience for the cadence of good design has worn thin, making it even more difficult to ensure design fundamentals are followed. Design leaders must discover ways to protect best practices that drive human behaviors, ensure ethical tech evolution, and solve the right problems or risk even greater scrutiny from partners who never fully believed that design added any value at all.
Speaking of partners, Product and Engineering responsibilities and skills are blending with traditional design roles, creating overlaps that introduce challenges for all three groups. In a world where, thanks to AI, “everyone can design, anyone can code, and technology can determine strategy”, none of these roles is safe. This year, design leaders intend to cement the role of design within business transformation while keeping well-established principles intact.
Cutting through the noise to deliver impactful work
It’s not just AI that’s preventing Design Teams from delivering their best work under intense economic pressure. The incessant shifting of business priorities, non-stop technological advances, and ongoing organizational upheaval have pulled these teams in so many directions that “forward” is tough to achieve. It is difficult to solve the right problem when you have no idea where the business is headed, who is actually driving the bus, or which tools to use.
Worth mentioning is that artificial intelligence is actually creating more work for busy, confused teams. A recent HBR article confirmed that instead of reducing effort as promised, AI is intensifying work by expanding tasks, blurring lines between work and home, and leading to time-wasting multitasking.
All this noise has exhausted Design Teams, leading to burnout and lower productivity at a time when design leaders most need to prove design’s value to their execs. Sharp leaders are carving out time for meaningful work for their teams, providing opportunities for them to learn new skills, sharpen their craft, and discover innovative solutions that go beyond the pixel-pushing requests from partners who lack design expertise.
Designers thrive in environments where their work has an impact on their users, their partners, and the business. The best teams are finding ways to harness the swirl around them, extracting worthwhile information and opportunities they can turn into wins to showcase their abilities. The best design leaders are setting the conditions in which those results are possible.
Taking AI out of the experimental phase
Drained from over two years of experimenting with AI, design leaders are determined to distill those learnings into desirable, feasible, and viable solutions this year. One leader shared that she’s focused on creating a cohesive ecosystem from her organization’s various applications and digital footprints. She also recently discovered a 60-page document on using AI that one of her Designers created, prompting her to dig deeper into how the team is leveraging technology.
Yet another leader has set a 6-month timeline for their team to turn experimentation into commercial value, providing guideposts and revenue targets to sharpen their attention on what works—not just what’s possible. By introducing rigor and OKRs to exploration, these design leaders aim to demonstrate design’s value through measurable outcomes that can be communicated to leadership.
Bringing data and analytics even more intentionally into their design processes, leaders seek to harness AI's strengths in ways that inform strategies and lead to greater results. They seek a partnership with artificial intelligence to complement the human-centered approach that Design Teams are best equipped to deploy. Instead of waiting for a corporate strategy to guide AI usage, they’re charting their own path and treating the next phase of evolution as a design problem to be solved.
The design leader's path forward
The road ahead may be unclear, but design leaders are prepared. In fact, they are redesigning the role of design itself to solidify its place within business strategy as a key driver of success. By preserving the integrity of human-led design methods, cutting through the noise of burnout and shifting priorities, and applying commercial rigor to AI applications, they are transforming a period of disruption into a strategic advantage. This year marks a shift from defense to offense, as design leaders treat the evolution of technology as an opportunity to thrive, ensuring their impact remains both measurable and irreplaceable.
Why do we care? Our mission is to connect leaders to find solutions. If you're a senior design, experience, or creative operations leader of an in-house team at a high-profile brand and want to connect with others who share your unique challenges, let's talk. Our InsideOut community hosts small-format roundtables to support the learning and growth of our members, and we’re honored to facilitate those discussions.
About the author
Susie Hall is Aquent's Community & Customer Engagement President. In 1999 she joined Aquent as an interactive Agent. Over the past 21 years, she's led regional teams, developed a robust interactive design practice and launched Aquent's Vitamin T brand in 2011 to address the rapidly evolving digital talent needs of agencies and mid-sized companies. With 15 Best of Staffing service awards and hundreds of thousands of connections made, she brings a deep understanding of creative, design, and leadership. In 2019, Susie launched Aquent's InsideOut Design Leadership Community, connecting senior in-house design, experience, and operations leaders from high-profile brands through facilitated peer discussions based on real-world challenges.
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