How I use AI
2025's Biggest Buzz-Word.
The Product Design Flow Has Changed, For Good.
What’s really happening with AI and design
If you scroll LinkedIn or Twitter long enough, you’ll probably run into the same two opinions over and over: “AI is going to replace designers” or “AI is just another tool, everybody calm down.” Neither one is all that useful when you’re actually trying to figure out what skills to build, what’s worth paying attention to, or how to even talk about AI with your team or clients.
The way I have used AI (in 2026), is a lot less dramatic, and a lot more practical. AI is speeding up the ability to create designs, changing how I work, and highlighting the human-judgement aspects of design. But it is not, and never will, change whether designers matter.
Most of our teams aren’t operating in some fully AI-powered future, and they’re definitely not ignoring it either. With my current design team, it's somewhere in the middle: people stitching together ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude with Figma, Bolt, Replit, whatever helps them move faster. Some of our designers are all-in and experimenting constantly, others are skeptical, and leadership is often talking about “AI initiatives” without fully defining what success even looks like. There's a pressure to stay informed and on the bleeding edge of AI in design, but it's a lot of pressure and uncertainty, which is a big part of why AI feels so overwhelming right now. The doom and gloom of AI taking our jobs is often remedied when it's reminded that AI isn't a human, and humans often don't know what humans want. It can take a lot of iterating, time, and knowledge before we can decide what we truly want and what is the best. This is something that AI can't fill in for us. It's a great reminder that humans will always need to have the final say for what is best for humans.
From an IBM training Manual 1979. Sentiment is true in 2026
The AI Moat:
As AI rapidly commoditizes inface production, the durable advantage shifts from what we design to who we design for and why.
Humans still own judgement
Before I dive into the main stages of design, I have outlined some of the major tools I use, or have used, and what what stages of the design cycle they are most beneficial. This list will inevitably change, as this list has changed in the last 3 months, but here's a snapshot of some of the major AI tools that I'm using today (as of spring 2026).
DISCOVER
DEFINE
DEVELOP
DELIVER
My AI-Assisten Product Design WorkFlow
Discovery
Goal
Understand users, uncover pain points, identify opportunities, align on the problem space.
How I Use AI
Summarizing interview transcripts and workshop notes
Identifying recurring themes across research sessions
Generating hypotheses and follow-up research questions
Turning raw observations into structured insights
Drafting journey maps, JTBD frameworks, and opportunity areas
Assist in drafting Maze surveys, and also analyzing the information obtained from surveys
Tools
Gemini, Claude, Firefly, Loom, Pendo, Maze, Notebook LM
Here's how my latest project used AI to help run discovery. We had a ton of user interviews, transcripts, video calls, documentation, and wanted to pull information out of it. This would normally take countless hours to read through them all, take notes, and manually start synthesizing the data. Loom records video calls and transcribes the meeting, Fireflies does the same but has different breakdowns, Gemini digests our documentation, Maze collects user survey data, and finally Notebook LM takes all the data from these other 4 processes, and acts as a powerhouse for synthesizing the data in themes, pain points, patterns, possible avenues to follow to solve the biggest problems for our users. This helps me spend less time organizing information and more time identifying meaningful product opportunities.
900+
Minutes of user interviews
48+
Documents, transcripts, reports
Instant
Cognitive overload relief
Define
Goal
Translate ambiguity into clear product direction, workflows, and strategic alignment.
How I Use AI
Framing problem statements
Exploring edge cases and user scenarios
Stress-testing information architecture
Drafting UX copy and interaction states
Creating alignment artifacts for product and engineering teams
Mapping user flows and alternative pathways
Creating "Gems" in Gemini to be the expert sources for all of the above
Tools
Gemini, Claude, Notebook LM, Pendo, Jira
I often use AI as a thought partner during early product definition, especially for identifying missing scenarios, challenging assumptions, or exploring alternative interaction models before design work becomes expensive to change. I recently started utilizing Gemini's "Gems", which are similar to Claude's "Skills" if you're familiar. I created a Gem that was a UX expert in the scheduling world. I fed it documents, interviews, JTBD, as many defining documents that already existed within our space. This gem allows me to ask it specific questions and for it to perform tasks capturing this knowledge as a source of truth. This gem helps me write stories, run discovery, focus on the reoccuring themes, find gaps in our documentation and fill those holes.
01
Strategic
Alignment
02
Intelligent
Synthesis
Create project-specific Gems
Build a knowledge base
Start a chat via Gems
Generate design stories from chat context and Gem knowledge base
Personas
JTBD
Product Charter
JPD Artifact
Product Requirement Documents
A model showing how I use Gemini to help define a project. I've been told Claude has a similar feature called "Skills"
An example of my current "Gem". This scheduling partner has built a knowledge base allowing me to converse with it.
This mind map was created from 5 user interviews on which features to focus on. It can now frame problem statements, create user stories, and draw from a single source of truth to remain accurate.
Operational speed
Operate with significantly higher velocity by bypassing the "cold start" phase. Pre-loaded project documentaiton ensures every chat is a sprint toward a solution
Reduced busy work
Automate repetitive administrative tasks, initial documentaiton drafts, and ticket formatting. Offload the "scut work" to focus on high-value human creativity.
Increased accuracy
Ensure every output is grounded in a persistent source of truth. Specialiazed context elimates hallucinations and ensures domain specific percision
Develop
Goal
Design, prototype, iterate, and collaborate with engineering.
How I Use AI
Creating exploratory layouts and interaction ideas
Generating prototypes and front-end starter code
Accelerating design system documentation
Producing variant explorations faster
Tools
Figma Make, Bolt, Claude
AI helps me move from concept to prototype significantly faster. Instead of spending hours building low-fidelity proof-of-concepts manually, I can quickly generate high-fidelity concepts and spend more time refining usability. One of the pieces I love is that it takes the blinders off that I sometimes have when thinking about interactions or layout. I give Figma Make examples of pages that already exist, a design system to pull from, and prompts created from Gemini so it's crafted around all the source of truth. But even still, I'm pleasantly surprised sometimes that an idea gets sparked in me after seeing the output it gives. I usually have to tweak the output for my projects use cases, but I attribute the rapid creation as sparking more curiousity in how the pages could flow.
All my recent work with AI is under a NDA, and I do not have the rights to show it off, but I can create a mock page design for something similar, showing the steps I take and the compromises I need to make in order to show. Often, the first step I do is to ask Gemini or Claude to help me with prompts to give Figma Make. the reasoning: I find AI can scrape all the wording/documentation to include the micro constraints that aren't top of mind and have them included.
900+
Minutes of user interviews
48+
Documents, transcripts, reports
Instant
Cognitive overload relief
Deliver
Goal
Ship polished experiences and support implementation across teams.
How I Use AI
Writing implementation-ready documentation
Generating acceptance criteria and edge-case considerations
Creating presentation narratives for stakeholders
Producing onboarding or handoff materials
Auditing flows for consistency and accessibility considerations
Tools
Claude, Gemini, Jira, Figma
I use AI to accelerate communication and reduce ambiguity during handoff. Instead of replacing collaboration, it helps me create clearer documentation, stronger rationale, and faster alignment across cross-functional teams.
900+
Minutes of user interviews
48+
Documents, transcripts, reports
Instant
Cognitive overload relief