AI won't replace designers because it lacks taste and subjective opinion. Instead, as AI gets better at generating highly opinionated (though not perfect) designs, it will serve as a powerful exploration tool. This plants more flags in the option space, allowing human designers to react, curate, and push the most promising directions further, amplifying their strategic role.

As AI makes it easy to generate 'good enough' software, a functional product is no longer a moat. The new advantage is creating an experience so delightful that users prefer it over a custom-built alternative. This makes design the primary driver of value, setting premium software apart from the infinitely generated.

As AI automates tasks and replicates knowledge, what remains fundamentally human is our personal narrative. The collection of experiences, memories, successes, and failures shaping who we are cannot be generated by AI, making authentic storytelling a core human differentiator.

AI-generated design falls short because it cannot integrate the myriad of constraints top designers handle: business goals, cultural context, brand emotion, and system-wide consistency. AI will eliminate drudgery, freeing designers to focus on this higher-level, holistic, and creative work.

Surveys show people believe AI harms creativity because their experience is limited to generic chatbots. They don't grasp "context engineering," where grounding AI in your own documents transforms it from a generalist into a powerful, personalized creative partner.

As AI generates endless look-alike content, a brand's ability to create genuine, human-to-human connection is a unique and defensible advantage. This 'vibe' cannot be automated or easily replicated, making it a crucial competitive differentiator in a crowded market.

AI models lack access to the rich, contextual signals from physical, real-world interactions. Humans will remain essential because their job is to participate in this world, gather unique context from experiences like customer conversations, and feed it into AI systems, which cannot glean it on their own.

As AI generates vast amounts of generic content, brands that showcase genuine human stories, empathy, and creativity will build stronger connections and trust that technology cannot replicate.

Perplexity's VP of Design, Henry Modiset, states that when hiring, he values product intuition above all else. AI can generate options, but the essential, irreplaceable skill for designers is the ability to choose what to build, how it fits the market, and why users will care.