Will AI replace designers?
My answer is still no. But the reason why has become clearer over the last year.
AI has not made design more strategic. It has made output cheaper, faster, and more abundant. And in doing so, it has quietly shifted where real value sits.
The risk is not that AI replaces designers. The risk is that design becomes a flood of plausible looking artefacts with no underlying point of view. When everyone can generate a logo, a landing page, or a brand kit in minutes, the output itself stops being the differentiator.
What matters instead is judgement. Structure. Intent.
That is where design either becomes strategic, or becomes disposable.
The commoditisation problem
AI is very good at producing something that looks like a brand. It is far less good at understanding why a brand should exist in a certain form, or how it needs to behave over time.
Anyone can generate a hundred logo options overnight. But that abundance hides a deeper problem. Most of those outputs are built on averages. They are trained on what already exists, recombined into something new enough to feel original, but familiar enough to feel safe.
This is why so much AI generated design has the same vague tone. Clean. Inoffensive. Technically correct. Completely forgettable.
Strategy cannot be averaged. It requires exclusion. It requires saying no far more often than yes. It requires understanding context, ambition, and constraint, then translating those into decisions that hold together under pressure.
That kind of clarity does not come from prompts.
How I actually use AI
I am not opposed to AI, and I do not treat it as a threat. I use it, but I am very specific about where it belongs in my process.
In my studio, AI is an execution tool and a thinking aid, not a decision maker.
I use it for things like extending image backgrounds, generating abstract textures, or creating rough visual references when exploring a direction. I use it to unblock myself when I want to quickly see variations of a single idea, not to define the idea itself.
Used this way, AI saves time. It removes friction. It allows me to spend more energy on the parts of the work that actually matter.
What I do not use it for is defining systems, setting visual hierarchy, or making typographic decisions that carry meaning. Those decisions require context, restraint, and an understanding of consequences that go beyond the frame.
AI is useful when it is constrained. It becomes dangerous when it is treated as a substitute for thinking.
What AI still cannot do
Despite the pace of development, there are three areas where AI consistently falls short, and where I see the long term value of design becoming more concentrated rather than diluted.
The first is vision.
AI is fundamentally retrospective. It looks backward, even when it feels forward facing. A strategic designer is tasked with translating where a company wants to go into something tangible in the present. That requires understanding ambition, risk, and positioning, not just aesthetics.
The second is typography.
Typography is not decoration. It is structure, rhythm, and voice. Small adjustments in spacing, proportion, and letterform shape can completely change how a brand is perceived. Authority, warmth, confidence, restraint. These qualities live in details that are easy to overlook and hard to automate.
AI can suggest fonts. It cannot understand why one type decision aligns with a company’s strategy while another undermines it. It cannot design a typographic system that becomes an ownable asset over time.
This is where most AI driven branding quietly fails.
The third is system thinking.
A brand is not a logo, and it is not a collection of assets. It is a system that needs to hold together across touchpoints, teams, and years. AI is very good at generating isolated artefacts. It is very bad at maintaining coherence across complexity.
Design systems require anticipation. They require thinking through edge cases and future use, not just the ideal scenario. This is slow work. It is unglamorous. It is also where brands either gain strength or slowly erode.
What this means going forward
The future is not human versus machine. It is designers who understand how to use new tools without letting the tools define the work.
The role of the designer becomes more editorial, more strategic, and more accountable. Less time spent pushing pixels, more time spent deciding what should exist at all.
For founders and growing companies, this shift is important to understand. The question is no longer who can make something quickly. It is who can make something that lasts, and who can explain why it works.
AI can generate options. It cannot give you a point of view.
Your brand does not need more output. It needs clarity, intention, and a system strong enough to survive scale.
That is not something you can prompt into existence.
