Adam Cutler

I had the chance to explore a question close to my heart: How do we weave what’s human into AI patterns? For me, intelligence is more than computation—it’s empathy, creativity, and ethics. As designers and leaders, we have the opportunity (and responsibility) to shape AI in ways that honor humanity, not just efficiency. Hear why design culture matters more than ever in the age of AI, and share your perspective: What values should we insist on weaving into the future of AI?

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Sean J. Savage adapts Stewart Brand’s “Shearing Layers” concept to AI product development, mapping out six distinct “pace layers” that evolve at different speeds. This helps corral riskier “move fast and break things” methods to the stylistic parts of your project, while ensuring a sound “measure twice; cut once” approach to critical structure.

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Design is evolving fast. We’re no longer just shipping artifacts, rather, we’re shaping intelligent systems that learn, adapt, and co-create with us. This next era asks more of us:
more judgment, orchestration, contextual intelligence, and the ability to guide systems that won’t stay static. Our work now is to design conditions for emergence and to keep humanity in the loop. Here’s my take on what’s ahead: https://lnkd.in/gjbey3nZ #designexcellence #designleadership #humancentereddesign #designingwithAI #enterprisedesign

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GV (Google Ventures) have a long history of hiring former designers and design leaders to support their portfolio companies. Folks like Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Kate Aronowitz, Daniel Burka, Braden Kowitz, Vanessa Cho, and Tom Hulme. In my latests podcast interview, Kate Aronowitz explains why this is, and what designers bring to the table. Interestingly it's not about craft, but rather the way they see the world with a beginners mind.

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This is what investing in AI in design looks like. As with many other job families, the design industry focuses on what might the impact of AI be: will it lower the quality with slop? Will it replace humans? Etc But I don't see much focus on to understand and really capitalise on the potential AI brings to design. We are largely treating it as any other tool: a way to get incrementally better. At best it's a short course for the designers, at worst it's expecting designers to already know how to use it. But AI has the potential for making radical shifts and leaps. I'd love to hear, and learn, from anyone who is making significant strides to drive AI transformation in design.

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Hot take for designers experimenting with AI + legacy systems: You don’t have to pick one AI tool and hope it integrates perfectly with your design archive. If you can get to the code, you can make it work. I’ve been testing different AI platforms for strategy and prototyping. What I realized: You can use any AI tool you’re comfortable with to think, prototype, and generate UI — as long as it outputs code. Then: 1. Copy the generated code 2. Paste it into Figma Make 3. Let Figma rebuild it using your UI/style library 4. Edit, refine, and share inside your real system That means: • Strategy can live anywhere • Prototyping can move fast • Your design system still governs the final output AI becomes a thinking partner. Figma stays the system of record. For teams sitting on years of legacy designs and wondering how to bridge that with AI experimentation — this is a practical path. #DesignSystems #AIforDesign #Figma #ProductDesign #DesignOps

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Most enterprise leaders treat design as an aesthetic luxury. But as CDO at eleopard, I see it differently. When your software is clunky, you aren’t just looking at an ugly interface. You are looking at frictional loss. You are paying for your employees to fight their tools instead of using them. I’ve seen companies waste millions on "pretty" templates that don't scale and "quick patches" that just hide deeper architectural failures. At eleopard, we’ve drawn a line in the sand. We don’t do patchwork, and we don't do "flashy" for the sake of trends. In my latest article, I break down our engineering-first approach to UX: ✅ Custom over Templates: Why "off-the-shelf" is a long-term liability. ✅ Design as a Blueprint: How we use Figma to eliminate the "interpretation gap" for developers. ✅Risk Mitigation: Using interactive prototypes to kill bad ideas before they become expensive code. ✅Implementation Freedom: Why we favor WordPress + Elementor to keep your architecture out of "walled gardens." If your enterprise software has become a bottleneck rather than a bridge to growth, it’s time to stop patching symptoms and start solving root causes. Read the full manifesto here: https://lnkd.in/gDAW4fuV #EnterpriseUX #ProductDesign #ROI #eleopard #DigitalTransformation #Leadership

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We're starting 2026 with a 🧨 . The new Continuum Design Studio is our first major release this year, and I couldn't be more excited. We've gone beyond drag-and-drop page design in the CMS. You can now harness AI to describe what you want on the page and watch it come to life. Advanced features let you bind the page elements to dynamic data so your newly created page updates automatically as you manage your content. This is a huge unlock for our users. It saves time and money, but it also gives them incredible control without the need for a development team to make changes. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gQ29YuVe

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Can't we just make our personas using AI now? Um. Not yet, no. But they might be helpful as a supplement. Very interesting paper on this: https://lnkd.in/g2TUTCfi Here's some highlights: -"If we were to capture this [AI-created persona] as a persona headshot, we would imagine an overconfident, idealized Superman-like character—muscled and polished, flawless and unbounded—totally unaware of their own limitations." -"GPT fell short of the kinds of contextualized insight our human respondents provided." -"The AI responses our team collected felt unrealistic and didn’t help us learn how to best prioritize the vast amounts of potential data about the users and their habits."

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