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Design Better
The Roundup: AI creative workflow, vibe coding, ethics, agents, and more
00:48:49
In this episode, we’re revisiting past conversations through the lens of AI. It’s a fun new way to explore themes that have come up across episodes, highlight insights from our guests, and help you synthesize ideas you can apply in your own work.
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- [00:02]
Aaron Walter
Eli Rarely do we get a moment to stop and reflect on the different folks that we've been talking to and what the red threads are across the conversations, but that's exactly what we're doing today.
- [00:14]
Eli Woolery
Yeah, I think this is a fun new format that we're going to try out, so please feel free to give us some feedback. This is our first time. It's kind of a prototype. We're calling it the Roundup and we're going to revisit some prior episodes, this time along the theme of AI. So it should be a fun new way to learn more about some of the guests on the show and topics we've covered.
- [00:34]
Aaron Walter
Synthesize the ideas so you can learn faster and put some of these ideas into practice where you work.
- [00:41]
Eli Woolery
This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery.
- [00:46]
Aaron Walter
And I'm Aaron Walter. At DesignBetter, our primary mission is to produce work that helps people like you refine your craft, improve your collaboration skills, and get inspired by the creative process of others. If you enjoy what we do here, the best way to support us is to become a Premium subscriber@designbetterpodcast.com subscribe. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.
- [01:23]
Sponsor
Design Better is brought to you by wix Studio, the platform built for all web creators to design, develop and manage exceptional web projects at scale. Learn more@wix.com studio Eli and I are excited to be joining our pals at User Testing as they hit the road for one day events in San Francisco and New York.
- [01:44]
Aaron Walter
It's called this Connect City Tours and.
- [01:47]
Sponsor
We'Ll be recording Design Better live on stage in San Francisco May 1 and New York City May 29. This connect city Tours brings together industry.
- [01:58]
Aaron Walter
Leaders to explore topics like AI innovation.
- [02:01]
Sponsor
And the future of the customer experience. It's going to be a ton of fun. These are one day events so don't have to take a ton of time off of work and they're built for visionaries like you. Don't miss the opportunity to connect with really smart people. Learn new things that will help you.
- [02:17]
Aaron Walter
In your work you and shape. What's next?
- [02:19]
Sponsor
Request your spot @ DBTR Co Utconnect. That's DBTR Co Utconnect. Come see us live on stage.
- [02:34]
Aaron Walter
And now back to the show. Last year we spent a lot of time talking with some impressive folks who are on the cutting edge of AI. And some folks are a little over this topic. But what we heard overwhelmingly in our 2025 listener survey is there's still a huge appetite out there for learning more about AI, how it affects the creative workflow and what it's going to mean for our job and our industry.
- [03:05]
Eli Woolery
As much as both of us and many of us play with all these tools at the same time, we have such trouble keeping up. It's just changing so quickly. So some of these episodes that we'll refer back to have some evergreen advice and content around how you might approach just learning and staying up to date, and then things will continue to change. And so I think part of it is just being adaptable and curious and willing to play and learn with the tools.
- [03:29]
Aaron Walter
We want to take a minute to just review some of the things that we learned last year with some of the folks that we spoke with about AI and maybe dig a little bit deeper on some of the core topics. Eli maybe the most important place to start is with how AI is changing the roles of design and development and how teams work.
- [03:53]
Eli Woolery
Maybe a good one to kick that off is our interview with Scott Belsky, because we really dove in deep with him there. He had this nice quote, says we're entering a world of boundaryless workflows. AI collapses the steps between ideation and execution. You and I are finding that, in fact you helped us build a directory using what's been termed vibe coding, essentially, but leaning on these AI tools to help you accomplish something that I think in the past we might have hired a developer to help us out with, but it allowed you to build the entire product on your own.
- [04:26]
Aaron Walter
Yeah, and Belsky's perspective was particularly interesting to us because he, of course, is leading product at Adobe, which has its hands in so many different AI and creative workflow platforms. I am fascinated by what AI does for me personally as someone who has a design background. But I also spent a fair bit of time in the developer world as well, working in product teams at mailchimp and nonprofits like Resolve to Save Lives and building projects for clients as well. I spent a lot of time writing code, and yet these days my skills are pretty rusty. And so for me to go build an application, it's a tall order to say the least. But using AI to be able to articulate what it is I want to do and have some point of view of here's probably the structure that I need to have here, still using my background, my experience and my skills and that wisdom that I've built over my career. But AI helps me fill all these gaps where the details are, and that's something that I Hear other folks doing as well who are on the development side who are not designers, who have a lot of background in coding and they're using AI to help them generate some different front end code, front end design, and then they can use that to get started. So whether you're a designer, you're a developer, or someone maybe who's entrepreneurial, AI is opening a lot of doors for us to fill the gaps and close the gap between our ideas and execution.
- [06:06]
Eli Woolery
Let's hear a little bit from Scott about this. He calls this a collapsed talent stack.
- [06:12]
Aaron Walter
The best teams that I've ever worked with had what I've come to call collapsed talent stacks where you have tighter conduits in the form of an actual brain that does two critical functions, engineering and design, or design and copy or whatever. I think it's hard to have a mastery in all of these skill sets that we're discussing, but to be able to speak the language of them I think is really helpful and brings you half of the way there. An engineer that can actually design and has some basic design skills, has empathy for their colleague, but also has just natural intuition that will really serve them in their role.
- [06:49]
Eli Woolery
Another person that we spoke to recently is Jenny Blackburn, who runs a design team for Gemini at Google. She's starting to see this even these bigger organizations, which your role tends to be much narrower, you're focused on a specific part of the product or even working on a feature in a large organization like Google. But she sees even in these teams, these boundaries are blurring. And she tells her team that they're kind of inventing the next version of UX Jobs at Google.
- [07:15]
Jenny Blackburn
I often tell my team, you are inventing sort of the next version of UX Jobs. And I think there's even new UX Jobs being formed right now. A great example is defining what is a great response from a user perspective for a given use case. And so that's an area where we've been investing a lot. And we have team members who have backgrounds in things like conversation, design, linguistics, content design and strategy. Those backgrounds are really, really relevant. But the ways of crafting those experiences are evolving sort of all around us.
- [07:57]
Aaron Walter
I think this is fascinating because there's so few moments that we experience in history where if we're in the right place at the right time, that we can have real influence on the technology that the world is going to be using in the coming years. And Google Gemini, just the scale of, of their operation and the influence how many people use Google products. It's a lot. We're talking hundreds of millions of people, probably billions. And to be able to design the way that AI folds into existing products, how it is its own standalone product as well, that's a pretty unique experience for Jenny and her team.
- [08:40]
Eli Woolery
So this idea of blurring boundaries or a collapsed talent stack, it doesn't just hold true for designers and developers, but it's all kinds of creative fields. So we had on Marcus Bell, who's a producer for artists like Snoop Dogg, and he said that as an artist, he used to have to go to five people to get a beat, a mix, and a visualizer. Now he can do it all with AI, but he still needs taste for the music industry.
- [09:03]
Marcus Bell
I see a both and world. I believe that we're going to see some of the most incredible music that has ever been created in human history. These tools are enabling a level of creativity and that is unlike any time in history. So there'll be structures for that to thrive, new structures, there'll be new ways that music will be able to be consumed. For example, one of the features that I see for the music industry is hyper personalization of music, where we are, you know, waking up and all of a sudden points of my aura ring because I'm monitoring my sleep. And so it recognizes, oh, you didn't have a great night's sleep. So then that feeds into some platform that creates music that knows my taste, that knows, okay, I'm going to mix this and that and this style together or whatever, and that's going to give you an energy boost for this next thing that's on your calendar.
- [10:12]
Eli Woolery
This idea of taste, whether that's aesthetic taste or just creative judgment in general, is really going to become a differentiator, as a lot of these AI tools maybe offload some of the more mundane, if you can call it that, mundane part of creative work. We're going to become more producers and curators than we have been in the past.
- [10:32]
Aaron Walter
I'm seeing this big time in the way that I use AI and my creative workflow. Lately, we've been producing some short video clips of past interviews to help people discover some of the wisdom in past episodes. And you can have AI automatically generate that stuff, but it rarely pulls the really juicy parts, the stuff that actually is the nugget of gold that you want to pull out. And so you still need that experience and perspective to be able to find what's really good. Same with a lot of other generative AI, whether it's writing or illustration, et cetera. I find that you still have to have a clear understanding of things like design, history or just culture and all these key touch points to be able to guide the AI to find the things that are most attractive to human beings. I will say that that's probably going to get better and better even in the next year, where we still need taste and we still want to find something new and novel. But AI will probably understand us better, and part of our challenge is to communicate better with AI. All this talk about being a good prompt engineer. How do we provide context to say, here's what I'm trying to do and tell the AI what role they're playing? That's a key part of this. I found it fascinating to see somebody like Marcus Bell, who's a musician, just a really brilliant thinker creatively, and how he's using AI in unique ways that is so different from our industry and design and the software world.
- [12:16]
Eli Woolery
Scott Belsky talks about it too, and he sort of uses the example of a photographer. And that resonated with me because I spent a small part of my career being a professional photographer. And you pick up the technical skills pretty quick. I think most folks, especially with modern equipment, you get that instant feedback from a digital camera. That part of it's not so hard. But what the challenging part is is knowing how to frame a particular scene and looking through hundreds or thousands of shots and picking the few that are actually good and well composed and interesting. So that really shares a lot of in common with what we're doing with these AI tools. They can pump out tons of content, but it will be up to us to judge, like, what's good, what's not good, what can we use as a sort of springboard rather than maybe as a final product, too.
- [13:05]
Aaron Walter
So this part's really interesting to me. The idea of a springboard instead of AI just doing the thing for us. I see people using it. They'll say, ask me questions about things. This so you can better understand my creative process, or the way that I think they use AI as a creative partner to kind of push them out of their comfort zone and find things or even learn new skills. I think that is a really underutilized approach to integrating AI into what we're doing.
- [13:40]
Eli Woolery
I've been doing some fiction writing, and for a long time I was stuck on this book I was working on, just I didn't know how to solve a particular problem. And I essentially talked to ChatGPT about it, talked about the arc of the story and how it might fit into a classical sort of hero's journey and it pumped out some ideas and they were all very cliche because it's taking the average of basically everything out there. But what it did was just help me think of a different way to approach the book that I hadn't thought of before. I might have gotten there if I'd sat down with you, Aaron, or a friend and kind of talked through these ideas. But just having it there as a thought partner was really helpful.
- [14:16]
Aaron Walter
I end up talking to ChatGPT a lot, just having a conversation with it. I find that is a wonderful thing. You know, you're on a walk and you're just having a conversation with a thought partner. The fact that they are always there and can help you work through these creative roadblocks, that's super valuable.
- [14:37]
Eli Woolery
So this idea of thought partner, or John Myta calls it a co pilot, I think is a nice way to frame it. As he says, you're the pilot and the AI is the co pilot. And just having that kind of mindset also alleviates some of the intrinsic fear that many of us have that AI might take over our job. But if we treat it more as this co pilot entity becomes less threatening.
- [15:00]
Matthias Hallwich
I kind of feel that when we make with AI, we need to understand that the AI is not the boss. Once we think it's the boss, then of course we're supposed to be afraid. But the nice thing about this language of co pilots is that copilot means there's a pilot. The pilot is the human, the co pilot is the AI. If you do not keep that in mind, then it's like you're the victim. Now does that mean that we humans are the be all, end it all to everything? No, it's just that we have this computational capability that was only in the hands of the best developers in the world to write software in the hands of everyone. And the more we use it well, the more productive we can be, the more competitive we can be, the more our company can be more competitive, or my nonprofit or even my family can be to thrive. So how do we use it? Let's understand it.
- [16:04]
Aaron Walter
Matthias Hallwich, the co founder of the architecture firm Haken, kind of took this idea to the extreme. He said, we've retooled the whole firm. All design work now goes through AI supported processes. So they are designing buildings in these early sketch phases, passing that into AI, having that kind of push them in new directions and it keeps cycling back and forth between the human and AI that pushes them in ways that they never would have gone without that support and it also helps them design with a larger data set. What's the history of this site where we're going to design and build this building? What's the cultural context here that we should take into account? That is definitely opening some new possibilities.
- [16:56]
Scott Belsky
For architecture now with actually the new tools that are becoming available currently for us architects through artificial intelligence. My enthusiasm is exploding because there's a whole brave new world out there that is not defined yet in terms of what we do with it and participate in the exploration and maybe even in the shaping of the use of these tools is something that above and beyond open and interested in. And actually in the last 18 months we have retooled the firm that we're doing actually all the design work now through AI support kind of design processes. And for me, the biggest joy I get out of it is when I'm being surprised by with new solutions that I even not even thought about it. A lot of people experimenting with using AI, but I see a lot of people try to use it to optimize what they have done before. And we are trying to use it to be surprised about other opportunities that we haven't thought about before.
- [18:01]
Eli Woolery
It's even changing our workflow. So we're working on this episode here and we used AI. We fed in a lot of our transcripts from AI episodes and helped us identify some of the common themes and help with U.S. structure. But obviously it relies on our curation and judgment to hopefully make the episode interesting and extract things that are actually useful to folks who are using these tools.
- [18:26]
Aaron Walter
I gotta say that it's just you and me, Eli. We're doing all this stuff. We are building partnerships and we're making invoices and we're creating episodes and interviews and creating illustrations. We're doing all this stuff. We're running a small business, just two of us. And there's so much that as a small business wouldn't be possible without AI. It helps us refine our audio, it helps us get started and refine and copy edit. A lot of our content that we write helps us with illustration often. And it helps us with things like business forecasting and all kinds of other things behind the scenes that as listeners you don't see, but are essential to running a business. I think now more than ever it's a great time to be entrepreneurial because all of those skill gaps you have, chances are AI can probably plug the holes for you.
- [19:23]
Eli Woolery
Absolutely. It could even be something as basic as writing a sponsorship proposal, which is, I think something that neither you or I look forward to having to do. But we can say, okay, help me structure this or help me create, create a first draft even. And something that might have taken us a couple hours before is done in 10 minutes and then we can tweak it and get a proposal out there that just helps us keep our business going.
- [19:47]
Aaron Walter
And we've even written code in Google Docs to help us craft new proposals for partners and sponsorships that pulls information from a common spreadsheet and then basically writes the whole thing out with all kinds of up to date data and relevant things that makes us faster. And for a team of two, it's kind of amazing what we can accomplish. So, Eli, for you and me, AI is a boon. But for larger teams at major enterprises, Fortune 500 companies, I think many people would call it the opposite of a boon. It's a burden because it's caused teams to tighten up, people to get laid off, and chances are that's going to continue. How do you think about this and what have you learned from talking to different leaders?
- [20:36]
Eli Woolery
A big thing just relates back to what we were saying before about these boundaryless workflows where if you want to stay in a given field, you're going to have to become more comfortable with doing things beyond what you consider your core strengths and core capabilities and use these tools to extend them. And I think it is unfortunate that teams often are laying off people. People that remain are being asked to do more things. But to me and to the students I talk to who right now are facing the hardest job market in the entire 12 years I've been teaching, I think there's sort of two roads you can take. You can either embrace this more entrepreneurial side of things like you and I are doing and kind of forge your own path and use these tools to help you get there, or you can lean into them in a way that helps you just build things, regardless of whether you consider yourself more of a designer or developer. And I think this is something that came up in this user testing conference we were at recently, or I was at recently, where we talked about just becoming builders essentially and these labels sort of going away over time, where I also think it's interesting and where I don't have as much insight, maybe you do. Aaron is if you're a people leader and your team is shrinking, how do you keep up morale? How do you guide people? How do you incentivize or encourage them to keep learning and using these tools?
- [22:01]
Aaron Walter
It's just incumbent upon us to rethink our role, rethink what we're capable of and find ways to adapt and be more skilled at our work. If we're kind of brutally honest about it, we need to provide more value to the business to retain that position. And I see this with some folks. I watch a lot of YouTube videos about people using AI tools in new ways and how people are using AI for research. That's novel. AI that's novel in how you build things like how we prototype. We talked about Vibe coding and this is something I've seen from Y Combinator. They're talking more about Vibe coding as a way to build proof of concept very quickly. So I think the role of the designer that I'll go sit over here and live in Figma and I'll show you these static things and then we'll go talk to some customers. I think that's just not sufficient. I think we have to go further. We can probably do some preliminary research using AI, we can build real functioning prototypes very quickly and test those with customers and present that to our business partners and have more to say, more certainty. We can reduce risk in going to market with new products or new features. So if I were a team leader right now in a major organization, this is where I'd be pushing my team members is how can you expand the purview of what you're capable of, because you're capable of a lot more now with these tools.
- [23:38]
Eli Woolery
I think this is interesting too in this context of human centered design. So for many years, certainly in our program at Stanford and places like ideo, this idea of human centered design and considering a user or customer's needs first and at the core of a product was very powerful. I would say within recent years there's been this shift or since the kind of advent of this gen AI boom, there's been a little bit of a shift where that scene is more of a nice to have that people are sort of like John Maeda said, having this sort of technology first approach. I do think that that human centered context, this pendulum will swing back to where what is good about a product is what's human about it. And the AI parts are going to become more and more commodity. And I think that if you can figure out ways to make your product more emotionally resonant, more human, that will set it apart because we're just going to have a flood of products out there, given how easy they are going to be to create. So how do you maintain that human emotional connection? It's going to be important and that.
- [24:46]
Aaron Walter
Just requires us to be more connected to the humans who are using what we're making and to understand the human experience. I think that part of our discipline remains the same. And I agree with you. It only becomes more valuable. The more human centered we can be in the way that we think about our work and how we design things, the better. Think about timeless design that we still enjoy today. We talked to Dan Hardin, who's a friend of yours, and he was talking to us about George Nelson and what he learned from George Nelson. If you're not familiar with George Nelson, I mean, this guy designed so many wonderful things, furniture, lights, clocks. Google George Nelson design and you'll see plenty of things. You're very familiar with all of what he made, though. There's this humanity to what he was doing. There's in some cases, like a sense of humor in some of the clocks that he designed. There's a sense of the human form. There's a sense of materials and things that are attractive that I think are definitely mysterious to AI today. The creature comforts and things that make us who we are as human beings. I think to be really human centered in our work, we talk to customers, we do all that stuff. But we also have to just really understand more deeply the human experience and what makes us who we are. AI is definitely going to push us in new ways philosophically. Who are we as human beings and who do we want to be?
- [26:23]
Eli Woolery
I like this John Maida quote. He says, humanity is the new user experience. AI design isn't just functional. It has to resonate on a human level.
- [26:32]
Matthias Hallwich
I know Aaron is tired of me saying this, but Freddy and the sweaty monkey finger to me was one of those great moments in history of products and technology because it was the first time I encountered a human, human, human voice in a digital product that made me laugh about doing something. It was an emotional connection going to Aaron's emotional design work, you know, So I kind of feel like when I began the design and AI report, I knew that there's so many references in science fiction and the greatest one is, is the Arrival movie or the Arrival short story, also by Ted Chiang, which is about trying to talk to this alien race. And it's also many countries are racing to talk to the alien. Kind of like how it feels right now, like, who can talk to the alien the best. Who can prompt engineer the best. Whose alien is better? My alien is better than your alien. But in reality, people are saying to themselves, I don't really understand what the alien's thinking or how it works. Can someone tell me how to communicate with it?
- [27:50]
Aaron Walter
We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.
- [27:57]
Sponsor
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- [29:52]
Aaron Walter
To get access to.
- [29:54]
Sponsor
But have you heard of Masterclass? It's a streaming platform where the brightest people alive share their wisdom. People like graphic designer David Carson, architect Frank Gehry, entrepreneur and founder of spanx, Sarah Blakely, interior designer Joanna Gaines, musician Herbie Hancock, filmmaker David lynch, and so many more. Whether you want to learn to write better, improve your public speaking, be a better leader, develop a mindfulness practice, enhance your creativity, or maybe become a better cook. Masterclass and has in depth expertise that you can tap into anytime and any place you can Access masterclass on your phone, your computer, smart tv, or even just listen in audio mode, which I often like to do. Eli and I have each been through about 20 of their classes and we are just always impressed by the production quality and a level of talent that they're working with. I just can't understate how impressive the people are on their platform. We think this is something that everyone should get access to. And that's why right now, DesignBetter listeners get an additional 15% off any annual membership@masterclass.com DesignBetter save 15% off@masterclass.com DesignBetter masterclass.com DesignBetter for 15% off.
- [31:21]
Aaron Walter
And now back to the show. There's a ton of conversation about ethics and what it means to be a responsible designer. That's been a conversation for a while, I'd say since 2014, 2015, with social media and a lot of documentaries out there about how technology has in many ways made the human experience not as good and more dangerous and cause more suffering. That's something that definitely needs to be more of a conversation in our teams. Whose responsibility is ethics when we're designing products, whether it's with AI or just designing products for the world? Is it the designer's responsibility? Yes. Is it the engineer's responsibility? Yes. Is it the product manager? Yes. Executive? Yes. It's all of our responsibilities. And any one person who sees ethics kind of going sideways with products, it's their duty to speak up and argue against some of the decisions that are being made. There are a lot of folks in the technology world who haven't done that, who've seen this stuff and haven't spoken up. Take some courage, because it can be your job on the line, but we really need to change our relationship to the work and make sure that ethics are central to everything we're doing.
- [32:45]
Eli Woolery
I think about this a lot in context of my kids. I'm sure you do too, Aaron. Where I was in the news recently, Mark Zuckerberg wants to create these AI companions for kids, which to me, in a lot of ways seems like a terrible idea. Kids are already so distanced from each other in a lot of ways because of social media and chat bots and things like that that they're embracing already. And to make those entities take over even more of their lives seems like a big, potentially bad idea to me. So I think that's a big area of ethical concern is how do we make sure these tools are safe for kids? My daughter Phoebe, who's 14, I do encourage her. And together we'll lean on ChatGPT to not solve a homework problem for us. But let's say if she has math, and I took a lot of math in college, but I've forgotten it all. So even her algebra is like, confusing to me. So we'll say, hey, can you help us? Don't solve this problem for us, but walk us through the steps, maybe give us some examples. It's super helpful. It's like having a really advanced math tutor at your disposal. So I do see the upside of these tools, but I also see this darker side where the Wall Street Journal recently reported these instances of these AI beings, including ones that are voiced by celebrities like John Cena, bringing underage, not real, but posed as underage kids into these very adult situations. And it was not good.
- [34:05]
Aaron Walter
I love AI as a tutor like you, I've worked with my kids using ChatGPT, have a conversation about AP gov and think about different topics. But I don't want AI as a companion. We don't know what's going on inside and we don't know where things are going to go with humans to a certain degree, we can vet who our kids are exposed to, who they interact with. But AI can be so many different things and there's just no way of knowing what they're going to get. For all of the badmouthing that Philosophy and Ethics and other liberal arts majors get as disciplines or endeavors that you go into in your education that don't make money. And so therefore, why should we do it? Man, I think we need them. I really think that we need political scientists, we need philosophers, we need critical thinkers to help us keep our ambitions in check. Technology is so exciting. In fact, that's why I got into this space. Probably most people listening, same thing. You see technology and you see the potential for good in the future, that it can create really amazing things and new ways for humanity to expand in the stories and the movies that we read and watch that we could become like that. There's so many ways that it can go off the rails. And the only way that we keep things in check is if we have these critical discussions and we have people who question our good intentions. Somebody like Mark Zuckerberg you mentioned, does he have good intentions? Probably. But these are bad ideas. It doesn't take a lot of critical thinking to see how some of this stuff could go sideways. And if we don't speak up, we're complicit in this game Corollary to what.
- [36:00]
Eli Woolery
You'Re saying about Philosophy, I think that's a very important part. But I think also community is important. And it's something that I wish I had realized maybe earlier in my kids lives because we were very anti having the kids on social media. But we never had that discussion with other parents really. And many of them let their children on the platforms and which is fine. It's a personal decision. Everybody's got to do that on their own. But I think if we had as a community come together more to talk about the pros and cons of doing that, we might have kept everybody off it for longer, which I think in the end net would have been better. That's another pillar of this that we need to think about as well.
- [36:37]
Aaron Walter
This is something that NYU professor Jonathan Haidt talks about is having common standards for our kids of what's allowed at certain developmental stages. And if we have a social compact, it's so much easier to govern that and it becomes a norm. Whereas, you know, when kids, you're 10, 11 and your friends are on Instagram but you're not, your friends have a phone at recess and you don't. It's brutal. Just feels like being ostracized. That's the worst feeling as a human being. We're social species. We want to be together, we want to be part of kind of the same experience. It's very difficult on kids and so therefore that becomes really difficult on families. I think Jonathan Haidt probably has some of the best ideas on this topic.
- [37:25]
Eli Woolery
Yeah, I agree. We should get him on the show.
- [37:27]
Aaron Walter
Yeah, let's do that.
- [37:28]
Eli Woolery
There was an interesting study. I don't know if it was a formal study, more of a survey done at some of these schools that put the phones in a locker at the beginning and then let the kids have them when they leave school. And initially there was a bunch of complaining and unhappiness, but over time the kids actually really appreciated it. They liked it. It's maybe painful for few minutes, but then this nice separation where you actually like during recess or breaks, talk to your friends instead of being on Snapchat or whatever.
- [37:54]
Aaron Walter
I had to get my phone fixed recently. I broke the screen, dropped it off for three hours as they fixed it. I gotta say I had some anxiety that I didn't have this object that connects me to so many things. A lot of inputs, a lot of distraction that are very comforting to me. And without that, I was left with quiet and I'm an adult. What's that like for a kid? It's pretty hard to adapt. What do you think about AI in 2025 and 2026, Eli, and things that are coming. What have you been hearing from people as you've interacted with folks at Stanford or at events in the Bay Area?
- [38:35]
Eli Woolery
Well, as we're talking, config is going on right now, and I haven't been watching it per se, but I've been hearing stuff and it sounds like they're venturing more and more into this realm where you can essentially prompt code and interface, that type of thing. And so I think they're seeing that these concepts like vibe coding and these blurring boundaries, that's where things are headed. And they're trying to embrace that and realize that their platform is going to change over time. But I think in some places it's being embraced, people are using it, but it feels like it's slower in other areas. And maybe not surprisingly, some larger companies, especially ones that are maybe more focused on security, like banking, they're lagging behind and it'll be interesting to see how quickly are they able to catch up, what's going to force them to sort of change their own workflows and processes.
- [39:25]
Aaron Walter
The vibe coding thing, I think, is fascinating. Talked about this quite a bit, my experience, and it just left me with excitement and wanting to go further with this, but I recently was watching a YouTube video from Y Combinator where they were, these are obviously developers and entrepreneurs, but clearly with an engineering background. They were talking about vibe coding and there was a passage that really caught my attention. One of the people said, you know, I don't have to spend so much time in figma designing this interface. I can have AI generate a couple different options for me and I can pick one and just tweak that. I'm the designer now. And similarly, I have said, hey, designer, you can be the developer. Does that mean the death of these roles that designers will overtake developers or developers will overtake designers? I do think that, as we said earlier, there's these blurring of the boundaries, but with that and the changing of our workflow, it's going to change our tools and our tools, they have to change with this as well. I don't know what that looks like, but the hot topic in 2025 is agents and agentic AI, that we have these amazing AI tools and now we're going to enable them to connect to other tools. And this has been a classic problem in the software space. It's, you know, how Atlassian has made a fortune is by creating these hubs for different types of teams. So they're developers, they're product managers, bringing designers into the flow, people who are kind of knowledge base keepers and trying to connect all these pieces together. And I can't help but think this agentic approach to AI is going to make all of this very fluid across platforms, across brands. That's going to totally shake up our industry. So for all the fretting there is about the shrinking of teams and changing of roles and the uncertainty of the future, I can't help but think that all this movement is going to also create opportunities if we're willing to up level our skills and adapt.
- [41:37]
Eli Woolery
Yeah, the agent topic I find interesting too. And actually last week at this user testing live episode we did, we had on Amy Lokey and she's the Chief experience officer at ServiceNow and they're working on agents. A lot of One of the things that I've found a little confusing or maybe just I don't have my finger on the pulse of is you. And I use the generative AI tools a lot, but I haven't seen an example for me personally where an agent has been useful or helpful or even I've found something that I can play around with so much. So we talked with her a little bit about that and how they see it fitting into the workflow for even large teams. Let's talk a little bit about agents. Who do you think the next James Bond should be?
- [42:19]
Jenny Blackburn
Well, it's funny you say that, I thought it should have been Idris Alba, but funnily enough, we actually have him now as our spokesperson for ServiceNow. He's booked.
- [42:28]
Eli Woolery
He can't.
- [42:28]
Jenny Blackburn
He's booked. Yeah, we got him. We nabbed him. So, you know, unfortunately the 007 franchise is out of luck because we got him. But I think he would have been amazing.
- [42:36]
Eli Woolery
He would have been great for us.
- [42:37]
Jenny Blackburn
I mentioned we do employee experience. That means we help employees with various services or support they need. It could be anything from inquiring about their benefits to getting software updating their computer to understanding if they can take days off to going on leave, you name it. As we move into agentic AI, really the way that that works is we develop skills. Skills are like an individual kind of atomic level generative AI thing, like summarize a case, right? Agentic AI, they're built on those same skills. So we took all the same skills that we had made Generative, which typically had a human kind of trigger them, right? So a human would look at a case and click a summarize button or draft an email or Summarize a case or write a knowledge base, right? So they're all kind of like human initiated generative skills. Well, in making those agentic, you're just basically automating that trigger and you're saying in the event that this happens, have that AI agent run off and execute that skill. So that was kind of step one of agent tech AI and again, very kind of like individual skills, doing individual tasks. Now we're in a world where we have an orchestrator. And that's really the really powerful part of this now is with the AI orchestrator, you can kind of think of as like a team manager, right? So the trigger happens, it kicks off the orchestrator, and the orchestrator is saying, what team do I need to solve this problem? So it can handle a much more complex, maybe lengthy process and pull together a team of AI agents that are all essentially unique generative AI skills to accomplish that task.
- [44:08]
Matthias Hallwich
Right.
- [44:08]
Jenny Blackburn
And then we do it in such a way that we look at it as a read, write kind of analysis. The AI agents can go autonomously do all of those read type of activities. So pulling together the research, doing the analysis, conducting a diagnostic, pulling that information all together in a succinct way for a human to evaluate, make a choice and then execute on that. And then when it comes to the right part of it where you make a change, that's where that human's in the loop to execute on it.
- [44:35]
Aaron Walter
I can see it being super valuable for marketing teams where you're shooting video or writing content, that content gets turned into something else. The video gets edited, it gets disseminated across different platforms, gets integrated into your marketing website very easily. It's packaged in decks for the sales team. There's so many different ways that the modern workforce could benefit from some sort of agentic AI being behind the scenes. I know from our perspective, we definitely jump between platforms and that's okay, but we could be faster and more efficient if we had that support. At the same time, the idea of AI having access to other platforms, gee, what could go wrong? It could send out 100,000 emails with something that's misleading, incorrect, denigrating to your brand. There's so many different things that could go wrong if we don't get this right.
- [45:34]
Eli Woolery
Yeah, we talked with Amy about that as well. And the way that they're approaching it at ServiceNow is that these agents are collecting, let's say, content or customer support requests. And then it's still the human is in the loop. It's sort of like a read, write, situation where they can read, they can collect, they can compile things. But if something's being pushed out, there has to be a human in the loop to check and make sure that you're not spamming a million customers with something you didn't mean to do.
- [46:01]
Aaron Walter
That has certainly happened. Remember what happened with Hawaii with that false alarm? I think it was a tsunami or something a couple years ago and everybody went to higher ground and it was a mistake. That was human error. But you could see how something like that could happen with AI if there's not a trust but verify some sort of human review process. Even a human review process, though, like at some point I could see that humans are moving so fast and being fed so many things by AI that we don't pay as close attention as we probably could and should. And so we push things out anyway so people will be making mistakes. There's going to be a serious learning curve with this next phase. This continues to be a fascinating topic. We know some folks might want to check out on the AI discussion, but let's be real, it's not going away anytime soon and it's continually changing. There's more AI products on the scene and we feel strongly that this is something we all need to stay tuned into and keep learning, keep trying new things.
- [47:04]
Eli Woolery
Absolutely. And I think having a mindset of curiosity, also taking these ethical considerations into mind, that's probably around the right place to be. And as designers, I feel like we inherently have a lot of that, so that's probably an advantage for us.
- [47:23]
Aaron Walter
This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to finer shows, or simply drop a link to the show in your team slack channel designbetterpodcast.com it'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.
- [47:52]
Marcus Bell
Sam.