The designer skills that stay essential and resilient

I recently listened to Dylan Field (Figma’s CEO) on Lenny’s podcast, and I felt it was the kind of message every designer needs to hear right now. It’s a hopeful reminder that as AI reshapes how we build, design doesn’t lose its place. It gains depth and importance.

Dylan is hopeful because he sees AI not as a replacement for creativity, but as a multiplier for it. When repetitive tasks get automated, designers have more room to think critically, explore deeply, and push the boundaries of what great design can be.

In his view, the more accessible software creation becomes, the more design becomes the defining factor of success, the human ability to make sense, make meaning, and make things that truly resonate.

Yet today, with more layoffs, fewer job openings, and teams growing leaner, I can’t help but wonder what comes next. It can feel as though AI is becoming more of a tool for cost-cutting efficiency than, as Dylan said, an opportunity for growth and doing more.

My curiosity (and, to be honest, my unease) led me to explore what makes a designer’s skills resilient in the face of AI, what we can do uniquely as humans and design professionals, and what remains essential to stay distinct from the kind of mediocre work AI will make easy to produce.

It’s not that robots will take our jobs (even build their own civilization) like in the movies. One thing history teaches us about automation is that the nature of work always changes. During the Industrial Revolution, when machines were first introduced, businesses shifted from skilled labor to unskilled labor (sometimes even exploiting children), because the work no longer required expertise. All they needed was someone to press a button. Designers today stand in a similar place to the skilled weavers of that era, highly trained, deeply experienced, yet suddenly forced to defend the value of their skills as automation accelerates.

Are we seeing history repeat itself with AI automation? Today, large language models can produce in seconds what used to take much longer to create in the past decade. The nature of design work is shifting. There’s no clear evidence yet, but the early signs are visible. Design teams are leaner. Designers are taking on adjacent roles: research, content, operations. ‘Super ICs’, senior individual contributors using AI to multiply their efforts and output are on the rise. The lines are blurring. PMs and developers can also use AI to generate mockups or prototypes, blurring what used to be clearer boundaries. It’s not impossible to imagine a single person orchestrating multiple AI systems to perform what used to take an entire team. Even before we reach agentic AI (where systems act more autonomously), we’re already seeing what it means to do more with less.

That question stayed with me.

What skills are essential, the ones that shape how we think, decide, and create?

And what makes a designer’s skills resilient in this new reality, the things that separate us from automation and from non-design professionals who also use AI?

Over the past weeks, I’ve collected insights from designers across different backgrounds to identify the skills that remain most essential as AI continues to augment and automate our everyday work. This survey is the next step to open the conversation wider and see how others in the field perceive these skills.

Thanks for reading (and sharing your perspective), and until next time,
Thomas