Do Companies Really Need Designers Anymore?

I’m CEO of a startup. Yes designers are definitely needed

Human made craft will become niche and highly valuable. Just like watches, sure you can get a factory made one which does the job but premium customers WILL pay for a custom handmade watch because they value the craft. When the invention of cameras came out, sure there were less oil painters but they became more valuable. Besides, non tech savvy CEOs are not going to use AI to create their entire app/website let’s be real, it’s us techy people who will use it to aid us.

For anything in graphic design if you want to be capable of scaling and adapting, especially if you want to print - you need a designer to made it, even if you did the whole concept with AI.

There should never be an excuse to bypass user research due to time or resource constraints. What used to take weeks can be done in days or even hours. I can summarize vast amounts of video and audio from research sessions in a fraction of the amount of time it used to take. I still have to go through and check the work of AI. The downside of all this automation is that junior roles will all but disappear, and instead of five or ten designers on a team, you can get by with two or three. Data can be extracted and multiple iterations made in less than a day. I see the value of design not in user interfaces but in solving real-world problems backed up by actual data.

From "AI CAN'T REPLACE DESIGNERS" to "IT DEPENDS" ☠☠. Are we cooked, Lovable, Bolt, V0, Cursor?

As a student looking into the possibility of pursuing design, I'm not worried about AI replacing designers completely, but replacing designers to the point where job opportunities would be uncomfortably scarce and/or insecure.

I've yet to see a successful example of any company in this world that shipped a product solved a problem using AI tools to design instead of hiring designers.

It's the same when you ask yourself if you still need an e-commerce developer. What AI is doing is streamlining processes, but that would reduce the number of employees.

yeah, the project manager, always thinking she can do my job recently did a whole series of AI shorts, cutting me out entirely. And she did a fairly decent job... I would have done better but what was produced was good enough.

Realistically, stakeholders don’t have time to do create websites, because they are running the actual business and would delegate designs and development processes to us. Everyone should use AI and know how to use it nowadays. This is the era of learning and learning quickly. When you are learning you grow. What could be better than your growth in career you love!