Why AI needs product people
If AI is anything, it's a double-edged sword. Not in the sense that it helps or harms; every technology does that; but because of its capability to produce. Perhaps the more accurate word is “generate”. It generates endlessly. It floods us with ideas, concepts, edits, experiments, questions, and answers. And the real risk of this flooding information is that it cannot discern. There is no concept of what is actually worth keeping, and what's not. This isn't a bug in the system – it's an inherent feature of it.
As many times as technology has shifted the paradigm (since, our good friend, the wheel), there have been those for whom the design of experiences built for humans has been of singular importance – a care that no AI system today can genuinely replicate, let alone grasp. The ones who can guide us are, intuitively, the ones with the most pro-human remits of all: designers. Better yet, experienced designers. Designers who try to understand what people actually feel, think, love, and hate. Designers who try to understand people.
Generative AI is designed to impress us. And it often does. It's spectacular at mimicking what we output. LLMs have their tells, sure, but part of their current ubiquity owes to an ability to embody the human. We can finally speak to something non-human, and it will reply with intelligence(?), succinctness, and occasionally, opinion! We've moved from text to image to voice to video in only three years: the entire history of technical communication, repeated, in less than half a decade.
Yet for all its progress, it lacks any understanding of why it's producing anything in the first place. All it knows is that it's been instructed to. While AI floods, designers judge. One is quantity. The other, quality. That's the real difference.
And here's the twist: the people who can actually guide us through this newest paradigm shift aren't futurists, engineers, politicians, apostles, or spiritual leaders. They're the ones with the most pro-human remits of all — designers. Design is not execution. It's innovation. And this is exactly why experienced designers shine: not for their abilities to create volume, but for their abilities to create value.
The system is built for output at scale. Of course, it's predictive in its thinking (as are we), but it's a determinist system – we can reverse engineer prompts from answers. It's zero-sum. AI does not empathise with experience, nor can it decide which ideas speak to real needs. Designers bring the unique ability to interpret and prioritise. They hear the music in the noise. Good judgment isn't simply a benefit of the discipline – it defines it.
At Made by Many, this is part of our DNA. We've spent almost two decades proving that design isn't a department, but our reason to build. Long before AI arrived, our teams were testing, learning, iterating, and shaping products that people didn't just use, but enjoyed using. Even our Managing Director spent more than 15 years as a designer. That speaks to our fundamentals, if we may say so ourselves: we're all designers, (lowercase 'D'). We all make. It's how we work, think, and interact. It's our culture.
So, as for the question then begged: Where's the value? How is AI earning its keep? What does it offer in its vast swathes of outputs that are making real differences to our lives? This is the question of the moment, after all.
For us, it's what is created when expert judgment is integrated with a new ecosystem of tools, features, and workflows that expands, not compromises, its power. The technology widens the field, and the expertise brings the focus. Visualising complex ideas rapidly before they calcify into constraints. Testing concepts that would take weeks to prepare. Exploring interactions without building entire products to life. These aren't processes that will ever remove the need for designers, as much as Silicon Valley may want us to believe otherwise.
AI claims to democratise creative work, pulling down barriers to entry for all. Fine. But the value of experience and commitment has yet to be diminished. While everyone can now look like a designer, only experienced designers can prove that good design isn't aesthetic theatre. It's a practice of understanding, discernment, and care.
And going forwards, to both make things better and to make better things, we're going to need them more than ever.
