Design has never been more visible. And yet it has never been more misunderstood.

Across the industry, teams say the right words. They talk about experiences instead of features. They talk about being user focused. They talk about design leading the way. But when you look closely at how products are actually made, something subtle shifts. Design gets reduced to the part you can see. Experience becomes aesthetics. User centric becomes layout centric. The screen becomes the whole story.

Those who have done real product design know how false that is. The screen is only the visible tip. The real work lives beneath the surface. That work is slower and quieter. It’s the interviews, the synthesis, the white space analysis, the cultural reading, the search for the signal inside the noise. It is the part where understanding happens. It is the part where meaning forms. It is the part that makes the visible possible.

AI has entered this landscape at the exact moment the invisible side of design is already being neglected. And because AI can generate patterns, interfaces, even insights at astonishing speed, it has become easy to assume the deeper layer of design is optional. A luxury. An artifact of an older era. Something we can cut in the name of moving fast. But that assumption is the real danger. Not the tool. The assumption.

AI absolutely can accelerate discovery. It can surface patterns we would miss. It can synthesize at a scale we cannot. It can generate ideas faster than we can write them down. I believe that. I use those capabilities. They make my process better. But AI cannot decide what matters.

It cannot understand why something resonates. It cannot feel the cultural nuance inside a moment. It cannot sense the emotional gap between what people say and what they actually need. It cannot weigh tradeoffs in a world that is more human than logical. That is still judgment. That is still listening. That is still design.

When teams skip this part, the product loses its center of gravity. It might function. It might even look polished. But it will not feel like it sees you. It will not feel like it understands you. It will not feel like it exists to help you. It becomes efficient but hollow. Familiar but forgettable. A salesman instead of a guide.

Some will argue that shallow things go viral. They might look shallow, but they are not. The creators understood the culture. Their insight was lived, not formalized. Viral things resonate because someone paid attention. Their process was just invisible.

Even in a world where most product patterns are commodities, resonance still comes from understanding. And understanding still comes from listening. And listening still requires a human being who can interpret the meaning behind the facts.

So the real question is not whether AI can design. It is whether we know which parts of the design process AI accelerates and which parts still depend on human judgment. Teams that confuse those two will ship products that look right but feel empty. Teams that use AI to speed the right parts will build products with more insight, not less.

My connection to design has always been a mix of art, curiosity, and responsibility. I discovered design the way some people discover music. It cracked something open in me. It gave me a way to understand the world. And as I moved between industries and founders and problems, design became a way of expanding my power. Every insight made me stronger. Every new space made me more capable of shaping something meaningful.

Flattening design puts that possibility at risk. Not just for me. For the discipline. For the users. For the products that could have existed but never will. Because design has never been a coat of paint. It has never been a speed hack. It has never been a shortcut.

Design is the mechanism that keeps products honest. It is the part of the process that listens before it speaks. It is the part that senses what cannot be measured. The part that connects dots no model knows exist. AI will not erase that. But misunderstanding design might.

The future of design depends on using AI to accelerate the right things and protecting the parts of the craft that AI cannot see. The parts rooted in judgment. The parts rooted in curiosity. The parts rooted in the belief that technology should serve people, not extract from them. The parts that make yesterday’s patterns feel new again.

If we forget that, we will still have beautiful interfaces. We just will not have meaningful ones.