AI is no longer a differentiator. It is infrastructure that forces us to change how we think, work, and value interactions. By 2026, the gap will not be between companies that “use AI” and those that do not. It will be between organizations that restructured how they create value and those that simply layered AI onto existing products, workflows, and org charts.

Hard truths learned from industry leaders, enterprise buyers, and dozens of AI founders who already made the mistakes you're about to make.

AI did not arrive overnight. It quietly embedded itself into roadmaps, workflows, research practices, and executive mandates long before most organizations had the language or frameworks to reason about it responsibly. Design of AI began in 2023 because we kept hearing the same concern from product, design, and research leaders across industries:

Innovation sprints help organizations de-risk AI, explore new value, and turn complex service challenges into clear, evidence-based decisions.

Service design aligns AI, automation, and CX into one coherent system that scales experiences, not silos.

Why Journey Mapping Is Still One of the Highest-ROI Investments for Innovation, Productivity, and AI-Ready Services

How fandom, creators, and AI-driven personalization reshape engagement, monetization, and community—and how brands can build durable advantage.

How AI is transforming customer experience from reactive journeys to predictive, personalized systems—and why CX must become core infrastructure, not a function.

Working with Gen requires designers to shift their mental models from deterministic to probabilistic output. Not only are you working with a new material, the technology is so new so there aren't any best practices (yet).

User research is a powerful tool in any innovator’s toolkit. Done well, it can unearth new insights to help product and marketing teams create winning strategies that build loyalty and satisfaction. It can help engineering teams gain new empathy for users, and direct efforts to fix their most burning pain points, or create moments of delight. It can also help solve user problems upstream and remove strain from overloaded CS teams, opening up bandwidth to provide a higher quality user experience across the board.

If you’re a UX or product designer, there’s reason to be worried about job security. GenAI enables anyone to design interfaces using prompts and Figma is collecting data in a way that is threatening designers. Maybe it’s the end of UX, but more likely we’re heading to a shift towards needing service design more than ever.

The more research platforms that UX researchers rely on, the more the field has become dependent on tools versus expertise. The range of new platforms are astonishing in how easy they make it to collect data about interactions and recruit participants. Overall, they’ve enabled research activities to scale and have expanded the influence of researchers within organizations.

The 2020’s have been like riding a rollercoaster blindfolded. For every exhilarating moment, there are more moments where you’re just desperate to get off the ride. It’s made it hard to plan or even make sense of what direction to go in. And the current turmoil in the markets has made it worse.