Efficiency will become ordinary

Every technological revolution begins with a collective panic.

Writing? Socrates thought it was dangerous: it would destroy memory and produce mere “seeming-wise” people. The steam train? The scholar Dionysius Lardner argued that speed would damage the eyes and make breathing impossible. Mechanical looms? The Luddites smashed them with sledgehammers, and their fear was well-founded: their craft was genuinely disappearing.

And here we are. This time, it's AI.

We cling to our repetitive tasks as if they defined our identity. We confuse what we do with what we're worth. We tremble at the thought that AI might produce wireframes faster than we do, as if that's what our profession boiled down to.

Yes, AI will do this better than us. And good.

Because we'll finally be free to do what we're truly good at. Reconnecting with the humans we design for. Understanding their emotions. Capturing their contradictions. Sensing what they don't say.

In April, I took a serious UX hit: two events, more than 35 keynotes, in seven days. UX Rotterdam, then UXinsight Festival in Leiden. Two different atmospheres, two different audiences, two completely different stages. A single message, driven home by speakers who had never met: in a world automating at full speed, the only thing that will still distinguish designers from AI is their ability to create experiences that make humans feel something.

What AI does better, and thank goodness

Let's be honest. AI is brilliant in many respects.

It produces wireframes in seconds. It generates design variants faster than we can draw them. It digests thousands of user feedback entries and extracts clean patterns. It writes standard microcopy. It codes front-end components. It optimises funnels. It runs A/B tests on its own, replacing an entire team.

And it doesn't stop there. It synthesises, summarises, categorises, sorts. It detects early signals in data volumes that would take us weeks to decipher. It automates what, yesterday, took up half our days.

And that's genuinely good news.

Because none of those tasks were ever the essence of being a designer. Time wasted executing what a machine executes better. Energy drained on deliverables that should have been afterthoughts.

AI frees up that time. It makes us available for what actually matters.

But what actually matters?

Humans: the bug no model can fix

There are blind spots in the algorithm.

Humans can't predict their own behaviour. They say they'll go to the gym and eat crisps instead. They claim they prefer option A and pick B. They tick “satisfied” in a survey, then leave for a competitor the next day.

Humans are storytelling machines. When we ask why they did something, they invent a rational reason after the fact. A reason that has nothing to do with what actually happened. We hallucinate our own behaviour, and we're convinced by it.

Our favourite metrics fuel the illusion. Green NPS scores, CSAT climbing, dashboards reassuring everyone. Meanwhile, users suffer in silence or leave without warning. We measure what's easy to measure. Not what matters.

Eelco Van Collenburg put it more brutally: “We've replaced art, poetry, and theatre with backlogs and funnels.” We optimise, we standardise, we industrialise. But we've lost the ability to move people.

This is where AI hits its ceiling. It learns from past data. It excels at what's stable, repetitive, measurable. It reads what humans declare, not what they feel.

Humans mutate constantly. They are contradictory, imperfect, unpredictable. Their emotions blend, their priorities shift, their needs evolve faster than any model can train on.

AI doesn't sit next to them. It calculates.

What matters can't be reduced to a number

Here, humans still have the upper hand.

Emotion. Intuition. Judgement. Context. Contradiction. Everything that makes a product not just used but loved. Everything that makes a place not just visited but memorable. Everything that makes a service not just consumed but recommended.

And yet, the essential still resists every model.

A user doesn't remain loyal to a product because it's efficient. They stay because they feel at home there. Because they recognise something in it. Because at a specific moment, they sensed that someone had thought of them.

A customer doesn't return to a shop because the products are perfectly arranged. They return because they experienced something there. An emotion. A surprise. A smile.

A brand doesn't stand out because it's visible. It persists because it touches.

At UX Rotterdam, Merel Backers delivered one of the most striking talks of both events. She spoke about her cancer, the loss of confidence, the rebuilding. And how those trials profoundly changed the way she designs for others. Because to create emotion, you have to feel it yourself first.

Anuoluwapo Adegboye put it differently: “Your chaos is your methodology.” Your contradictions, your flaws, your odd intuitions, your strange obsessions. Everything that makes you, you. Everything no model will ever reproduce. And it's precisely that which lets you capture what a user truly feels.

This is where designers have a territory to defend. Not in the pixels. Not in the processes. Not in the deliverables. In the capacity to make people feel something. To create a moment. To design an emotion.

AI will make everything else perfectly optimised, perfectly fast, perfectly standardised. And perfectly forgettable.

Efficiency will no longer be a competitive edge. The products, places and services that win tomorrow will be the ones that leave a lasting impression on our hearts and minds.

The others will die in algorithmic indifference.

Step up, or disappear

The design profession has just changed. And it won't wait for us to be ready.

If we keep defining ourselves by our deliverables, we're already replaceable. Wireframes, mockups, prototypes, components, specifications: all of it will be produced by the machine, faster and cheaper. Clinging to that is signing our profession's death warrant.

The designer who will survive this decade won't be the most productive. They'll be the most strategic.

The one who will ask the right questions before anyone has even formulated them. The one who will read a business, an organisation, a market, a culture. The one who will challenge a product direction when it goes off course. The one who will say no to a feature optimising a KPI at the expense of the human.

This stance isn't just about method. It's about influence. Ania Mastalerz spelled it out. Designers can no longer settle for delivering mockups. They have to become diplomats. Build coalitions. Map the powers. Frame narratives. Influence with soft power.

This demands something other than technical competence.

It demands courage.

The courage to back what Julia Bastian called the “gut feeling” when data says otherwise. The courage to slow down when everyone else is running. The courage to defend emotion in organisations that measure only conversion. The courage to be uncomfortable, sometimes provocative, often unpopular.

The designers who embrace this shift will have a seat. The others will have wireframes to redo. For a while.

But don't get me wrong. This isn't about opposing AI. Henk Haaima reminded us that co-creation with the machine is already here. And the best designers won't be the ones who reject the tool. They'll be the ones who collaborate with it. Who recognise its strengths. Who identify its weaknesses. Who use it to amplify their own capabilities.

So what now?

Step away from the dashboards. Kill the KPI walls. Get curious again. Go sit down, literally, next to the humans we design for. Listen to them properly. Watch them live. Sense what's at stake for them.

That's exactly what Serena Westra demonstrated in practice. To design IKEA's second-hand marketplace, she didn't try to automate everything. She sat on a sofa with a family in Oslo to understand how they actually lived. Simple methods. No AI. Just presence. And hypotheses tested by hand, in real life, with real users, in real countries. The exact opposite of today's reflex.

Alvin Chan lands the last challenge by revisiting Billie Jean King's iconic line: “Pressure is a privilege.” Not the pressure that crushes. The one that releases when it meets the right conditions: clarity, trust, structure. Maybe AI pressure is that kind of pressure. The one that will finally push us out of execution to awaken what we have most precious: our capacity to create.