“The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed”
Science fiction is inspiring, frightening, and often the best lens into the future. Many ideas about the future are b******t —just like this quote being misattributed to the ever-amazing William Gibson— but even the wildest idea shares truths worth discussing.
This week’s newsletter is an exercise in imagining how AI will transform the way that we work. The future will impact us differently because some already live with a future-centred mindset, while others prefer to shift their thinking daily.
One such future-centred thinker is John Whalen, the author of Design for How People Think and the Founder of Brilliant Experience. He shifted from being an AI skeptic to an advocate because he sees a tidal wave of change coming to how product teams operate.
Listen on Spotify | Listen on Apple Podcasts | Watch on YouTube
In the episode, we discuss how he’s implemented AI into his workflows and how he can now accomplish projects in one week that used to take seven weeks to complete. He makes a compelling case for why every team should use AI-moderation and synthetic users to enhance product outcomes.
But most importantly, he’s become an AI advocate because, over his three-decade career, introducing new tools has always been met with doubts and resistance. Ultimately, businesses force the adoption of tools that deliver a clear ROI.
There’s still much to debate about AI. Reports like this one from Microsoft continue to show that AI isn’t ready to replace humans at key tasks. Another 2024 study found that ChatGPT delivered inconsistent results on a key qualitative research task, compared to humans. The most important thing about this study wasn’t that humans outperformed LLMs; it was the significant performance improvement from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4.0.
AI is getting much better at tasks that seemed unimaginable to automate.
We’re hearing the same shocking stories across design, development, research, marketing, and sales. Undoubtedly, AI will be able to automate most of our work within a few years.
Will that mean we’ll be replaced? Yes and no. Just like the industrial age and globalization destroyed artisans, AI will significantly reduce the headcount of “artisanal” product people and the rest of the work will be an assembly line of tool operators.
Automation will significantly change many people’s lives in ways that may be painful and enduring. But for the economy as a whole, more jobs will be created, and those jobs will look different from those today.
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Should we be worried about our jobs?
These same conversations are happening across all fields:
* Will AI Replace Therapists?
* As Technology Progresses, Certain Accounting Jobs May Fade Away
* The Risk of Dependence on Artificial Intelligence in Surgery
* AI could terminate graphic designers before 2030
You’re probably reading this with a sense of confidence that you’re shielded from the impacts of AI because you’re working on the bleeding edge of technology. It’s true. You should be better equipped to navigate the changes as they happen and adapt to the future better than others.
Conversely, your roles face additional pressure to change faster than in other industries. The business realities of being backed by venture capital and private equity mean you’re always chasing the future.
Tech and agencies have to unlock benefits from AI or risk losing market share and funding.
The problem is that nobody can agree on AI's expected impact because it’s still just science fiction.
According to the OECD report, the level of impact will largely depend on the level of adoption. High adopters might expect a 3x gain compared to those who adopt AI minimally.
A McKinsey report highlights the pressure being placed on employees. Their data shows that C-suite executives blame employee readiness as a barrier to gaining benefits from AI. Only 1% of them believe their AI investments have reached maturity.
Combined with last week’s conversation with Jan Emmanuele, AI investments in creative augmentation and automation will surge in 2026 and beyond. This suggests that employees will be under a lot of pressure to become more productive or else be replaced.
Listen to that episode for more details on how AI is being adopted:
Listen on Spotify | Listen on Apple Podcasts
How will jobs change as a result of AI?
There’s no doubt that our jobs will change. They’ve had to change every time a transformative new technology becomes widely adopted. The only difference now is the speed at which change is happening.
Let’s analyze how roles are changing from the perspective of product teams.
* Our jobs used to be distinct. Each of us had specialties and expertise in areas that protected us.
* Our jobs are increasingly commoditized, meaning people from other jobs can do many of our tasks.
For example, a designer can now do tasks that previously were out of their sphere:
* Use ChatGPT and Cove to explore a strategy and build a business case.
* Use Wondering and Vurvey to launch and analyze a research campaign.
* Use Lovable and Cursor to prototype and build out a product.
Our roles are blending into one another, and employers no longer need as many people to deliver the same amount of work.
How we work is also changing. AI is simplifying core tasks along our workflows and automating cumbersome steps. Here’s an example of how AI will transform UX Research:
If you map your workflow, you’ll find a similar transformation happening to your role. Humans will drive decision-making, but AI will increasingly inform those decisions.
Maybe John Whalen’s vision of product teams as AI-conductors is most appropriate:
Maybe there will really be fewer UX researchers. Maybe they're more focused on this I'm calling sort of storytelling or conducting. I picture someone orchestrating these things.
What you can do to enhance your future
John Whalen’s story shows that you can be an industry expert who has written a respected book and led a successful practice, yet still need to adapt to the coming change.
He’s shifted from being a researcher to being a research technologist, one who delivers projects that used to take much more time and many distinct roles. This is similar to what Phillip Maggs said on episode 20 about becoming a design technolgist (Listen on Spotify | Apple).
Recommendations to help you:
1. Get closer to the decision-making process
We’re all anxious about the economy. The viability of many businesses is at risk, and job security is no longer guaranteed. Our goal should be to bring confidence and certainty to our work. That means pinpointing what our internal and external stakeholders are most worried about and delivering solutions that address those.
In the case of John Whalen and UX researchers, stakeholders had questioned the certainty of insights. With AI, John and others can deliver a 10x larger sample size in more markets.
Similarly, designers, writers, PMs, and developers should use AI to deliver work more confidently. You’re able to get more user feedback at every stage of the process. You can scale your work to be localized to more markets. You can automate tasks that are cumbersome and error-prone.
None of this is to minimize being human-centred. But the industry has been questioning whether orgs have been perpetuating the illusion of user-centred design. Managing stakeholders’ expectations puts you closer to the decision-making process and gives you the ability to dictate how good work happens.
2. Challenge the assumptions that limit expectations
New apps are released every month that bend our perception of what’s possible. If you had collected a list of capabilities that you wished were possible, they probably exist now.
Your job must be to push the work beyond the assumed limitations. To do this, you must test new apps and see if they can confidently overcome the limitations to your work. Explore new capabilities in the apps you already rely on. Experiment with combining applications that excel at key parts of your work.
Being tied to a single legacy app is the worst thing you can do. You’re hitching your future to that product’s ability to be better than the dozens of other teams simultaneously trying to disrupt each other.
3. Walk into every situation with clarity about your value drivers and superpowers
We can obsess over clients and our work, but understanding what you're exceptional at is more important than everything you deliver. We’re much more than our performance reports and more capable than the best project we’ve ever worked on.
It requires us to be self-critical about what drives us, what limits us, and where we can excel. For example, you might identify that:
* You’re envigorated by structuring and organizing
* You’re envigorated by hacking solutions and testing capabilities
* You’re exceptional at building alignment and support for initiatives
* You’re exceptional at taking on complexity and uncertainty
These fundamental truths enable you to dictate your path to success better:
* Who you should be working for
* What types of projects and roles you should be working on
* What unique capabilities you should be highlighting
* Which principles you should use as a north star for leveraging AI
If this is a topic you’d like to me dive deeper into, please leave a comment or send a message.
4. Remember that the future is not evenly distributed
The closer you get to the centre of tech, the pace of change will increase. The gravity of the situation is exciting for some and utterly exhausting for others. Find the orbit that best suits you.
If you’re reading this newsletter, you’re clearly a future-centred thinker. You can leverage that in the centre of tech to push projects and productivity to new heights. You could also work in a traditionally slower industry —healthcare, government, legal, education— and affect more change by challenging long-held assumptions.
All change is relative but what brings you joy and meaning is deeply personal. Embrace that.
One last and important consideration…
Erika Hall speaks the uncomfortable truths that we need to hear. Follow her.Some jobs simply aren’t worth keeping. Some uses of AI are appalling.
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