From Brand Outputs to Business Orchestration. How AI Is Transforming the Designer’s Role
The Business of Design is About to Get Very Real
TL;DR: Designers are facing a pivotal shift. No longer confined to creating assets like websites and logos, they are increasingly tasked with shaping entire businesses. As AI compresses product launches from months to days, the executional work that defined many design careers is being automated. This is forcing designers to expand into business strategy, systems thinking, and high-level problem-solving to stay relevant and command value.
This post discusses that evolution: from makers of artifacts to architects of business.
“If you’re not doing something with AI right now, you’ll likely regret it by 2030… In 5 years, you’ll look back and think, ‘All the signs were there. I had every opportunity, why didn’t I take advantage of it?’” - Entrepreneur Daniel Priestley
The Thread is Pulling Tighter
For years, design has earned its seat at the table. It’s no longer seen as the finishing touch, but an essential thread woven through a business’s ideas, teams, and launches.
This work has been the domain of a whole gamut of specialists — UX, Service, UI, Graphic, Interaction — each owning a different moment in the process.
But that thread is about to pull tighter.
The messy middle — the executional grunt work — is being eaten alive by AI. Logos, landing pages, pitch decks, UI mock-ups… Click. Done. Decent.
If you’ve built a career on that part of the process, it’s time to get twitchy.
But if you have strategic instincts, emotional intelligence, and a firm grasp on how businesses actually work—the next decade is yours for the taking.
You Can Now Spin Up a Business Like a Landing Page
A new idea is gaining traction, championed by thinkers like Daniel Priestley: soon, anyone, will be able to launch a business in hours, not months.
Sounds dramatic. Until you look around.
AI can generate copy, code, logos, and product shots — all before your morning coffee goes cold. No-code platforms let you stitch it all together without writing a single line of code. You can prototype, test, and validate an idea for less than a tenner.
The numbers back this up: as AI tools slashed startup costs by an estimated 90%, the number of one-person micro-businesses grew by 70% in 2023 alone.
This is leading to a fundamental shift. We're entering a world where starting a business is the easy part. The new challenge is making it work.
This speed is transformational. AI-driven tools now allow a single creator to build applications in days, a task that once required large teams and months of work. This enables hyper-niche ideas to be tested and scaled rapidly.
Take the hypothetical startup 6x founder Joshua Wöhle uses as an example: “TuscanyUke,” a company targeting left-handed Ukulele players in Tuscany. A venture that until recently, would have been way too niche to be viable. But, can now thrive when a bespoke product is able to be spun up in 48 hours at minimal cost.
Several converging trends are enabling these warp-speed launches. AI agents can execute complex tasks, no-code platforms democratise development, and digital distribution offers instant access to global markets.
The entrepreneurial playbook is being rewritten.
The Work is Moving Upstream
Design used to be the last stop before launch. Now, it’s the engine room.
A recent blog by Figma said: “Designers don’t just shape experiences – they shape businesses.” The teams who get this — the ones asking strategic questions before they even open a design tool — are the ones clients demand in the room.
It’s no longer enough to execute. Not when AI can churn out 80% of what we used to charge a day rate for. The value isn’t in the final asset; it’s in the thinking that creates it.
This is where the industry splits in two.
Down one path: low-end, high-volume work. Fast turnarounds, quick wins, and results increasingly indistinguishable from a decent AI.
Down the other: high-trust, high-stakes work. Fewer clients, bigger problems, and the expectation that you actually understand what makes a business tick.
I know which path I’m on. But it comes with homework.
Design Is a Business Skill
Hopefully, the message is coming through loud and clear: to stay relevant, designers must speak the language of business. They need to link their design decisions to metrics like conversion, retention, revenue, and customer lifetime value. Those who do so can elevate design from a cosmetic afterthought to a central driver of the business – effectively designing the business itself.
Our design educators need to be getting ahead of this. They're still teaching students to align type, not to align with business strategy. They needs to stop teaching how to craft personas, but profit margins instead.
If you want to be valuable in this new world — not just decorative — here is what you need to master:
Business Acumen: Know how the thing you’re designing makes money. Understand what the business needs to prove with its next move. If you can’t map your work to commercial outcomes, someone else will. Probably a Product Manager with better slides.
Systems Thinking: Stop thinking in screens; start thinking in flows and systems. {this is no longer the domain of the UX Designers and the Service Designers, it a universal design responsibility}. The customer journey, the internal ops, the tech stack, the market pressure — it’s all connected. Your design lives inside a system. Act like it. Become comfortable with complex problem-solving and scenario planning, approaching design as one component in a larger system that includes technology, operations, and the market
Emotional Intelligence: This is the stuff AI still can’t fake. The strategic pause. The gut feeling. The ability to tell a client their founder-led brand voice sounds unhinged, and do it in a way that strengthens the relationship. EQ is a power skill. When AI can generate a hundred variations of a layout, the differentiator becomes deep human insight – understanding what truly moves and resonates with people.
Storytelling: Not the airy, abstract kind. The kind that rallies a team, sells a pitch, and gets buy-in when your strategy adds a zero to the budget. You’re not just designing for humans; you have to persuade them, too.
Ethics and Critical Thinking: Right now at least, if you're deploying AI, you're deploying risks. Bias. Bloat. Hallucinated Bullshit. Designers are increasingly the last line of defence between something useful and something gross. Learn to spot the difference. Hone your skills in ethical reasoning, inclusive design, and critical analysis of AI outputs. You need to have the confidence to push back on purely algorithmic solutions when they conflict with human values or brand integrity.
We are moving from fixed outcomes to responsive systems. From interfaces to infrastructures. From design-as-output to design-as-orchestration.”
- design strategist Marzia Aricò
From Designer to Founder (Whether You Like it or Not)
The lines are blurring.
Studios are acting like startups. Designers are behaving more like product managers and thinking more like product strategists. No one’s staying in their lane because the lanes have been flattened.
This isn’t a bad thing. It’s evolution.
But it means that if you’re still thinking of design as “the thing you do at {key points in the process},” you’re already behind.
The good news? You have taste. You have instincts that can’t be templated. That’s your moat.
But you need to build on it with continuous growth and learning. Learn the things they didn’t teach you. Take the MBAs and strategy courses. Read the strategy book. Sit in on the sales meeting. See how decisions actually get made. Sketch out the business models as well as the user journeys. And very importantly, hone your soft skills – empathy, storytelling, leadership – that allow you to guide AI and not be guided by it.
Above all, remember that being a great designer isn't about mastering tools. It’s about problem solving for people: taking messy, complex business problems and turning them into something simple, elegant, and human.
If you can do that, you’ll be indispensable.
If not… well, there’s always Canva.
(Written whilst automating my own studio's collateral and wondering if the robots would give better feedback than most clients. They probably would.)