The AI Shift in Design & Research

⏱️ Your Morning Brief (TL;DR)

Welcome back!

This week, we dive into The AI Shift and get perspectives from design and research leaders at Amazon, AT&T and others.

If it’s not clear already, AI is fundamentally reshaping jobs across the board, including design and research.

This transformation repositions your user research and design teams from support functions into key contributors to drive innovation and strategic objectives.

How?

Design and research teams are the bridge between AI capabilities and genuine human needs, focusing on AI solutions that serve your customers and align with human values.

Here’s what to expect in this weeks newsletter:

• 4 structural requirements to developing AI solutions

• 4 ways to reposition your design and research teams

• 6 design inspired AI headlines to share with your teams

Let’s dive in 🤖

 💡 This Week’s Deep Dive

We’re still in a state of the transformation that AI where "technology is in search of a user".

It’s not just about making AI usable; it's about making it meaningful and impactful.

The Human Edge

The AI Shift emphasizes that uniquely human capabilities are not only relevant in the AI era but are essential. These are the four structural requirements research and design bring to AI:

1. Empathy and Intuition: Understanding subtle human cues and the "why" behind behavior areas where AI falls short. Design teams offer deeper inquiry beyond surface-level data.

2. Synthesis and Systems Thinking: Navigating complexity, reading between the lines, drawing connections across disciplines, stakeholders, and organizational history, humans provide a level of synthesis that AI can’t yet.

3. Judgment and Interpretation: Designers and researchers take messy outputs and translating them into actionable human insights, determining what matters, and providing the "explainability layer" for AI systems.

4. Imagination and Vision: Humans have the ability to think through what the future looks like and imaging different possibilities. Introducing AI into your teams workflow frees up time for your research and design teams to focus on this unique human capability.

Leveling-up Design & Research into Your Innovation Process

Design and research leadership can influence business strategy by strategically reorienting their functions ny:

1. Repositioning from insight to influence: Move beyond having teams collect and report on research, or visualizing data. Move them to actively shaping product strategy and business outcomes.

2. Embedding design in strategic decision making: Design leaders in the report recommend positioning teams more upstream where product bets can be made and strategy is developed. Andrew Birgiolas suggests that research can proactively offer user problems as inputs to AI strategy, acting as the "steering wheel".

3. Championing responsible AI development: Design and research are critical for embedding human values, intuition, and care into AI systems. Leaders must invest in research and governance for risk management, preventing costly mistakes, protecting reputation, and ensuring AI scales value, not just cost savings or problems.

4. Translating human needs into business outcomes: Design and research can act as the bridge between complex data and articulating the "why" behind customer behavior in business terms.

GPTLDR Takeaways

• Reposition research and design functions: Shift from reporting insights to influencing strategic bets, reducing risk, and accelerating learning loops.

• Operationalize curiosity and foresight: Build rituals that surface signals and provoke better questions, moving from documenting the present to shaping the future. •

• Expand designs influence across the org: Prepare your teams to flex across diverse AI projects and organizational change.

• Model the culture: Leaders should demonstrate resilience, curiosity, and clarity to shape the desired future for design and research.

📚 Interesting Reads

• Fast Company: Is this the end of Figma prototypes? (Link)

• Stitch is Google’s AI-powered tool to help design apps (Link)

• Microsoft: Redesigning how we work with Generative AI (Link)

• How to integrate AI without ruining your product’s UX (Link)

• Designing transparent and fair experiences (Link)

• How AI is chancing the landscape of UX and product design (Link)

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📚 Thoughts

GPTLDR Takeaways

As AI moves deeper into specific functions like design, it’s speeding up innovation.

 ➜ Until Next Week

Your design and research teams aren’t just support functions they can be enablers in building AI that is not only powerful, but truly human-centred. Look at embedding these teams early into the innovation cycle as a force multiplier for value creation.

Stay curious,
The GPTLDR Team

P.S. - We just launched Monday Briefs, curated reads on AI’s impact to your people, operations, technology and strategy.