Working Alongside AI: Adopting It at the Speed of Our Users
There is no shortage of conversation about artificial intelligence right now. Every week brings another model, another platform, another capability, or another conspiracy theory on your social feeds.
We can all agree, the pace is extraordinary, but I'm already seeing people focusing on the wrong thing.
For businesses, the question shouldn't simply be how quickly we can adopt AI or show our customers we have it, or how many processes we can automate. It should be how effectively we can bring people along on that journey and create real value. Heavens, we should be trying to reduce their workload!
But I've seen issues where we've pushed it onto our users without really measuring if we created true value for them.
Technology moves fast, but users move at different speeds.
We've seen this pattern with previous technology shifts. The internet, mobile, cloud and SaaS all created enormous opportunities, but making technology available never guaranteed adoption.
AI is no different.
Organisations are under pressure to demonstrate they're embracing AI. Product teams are being asked where they can introduce it, leadership teams want efficiency gains, and everyone seems to have an AI roadmap.
But adding AI to a product doesn't automatically make it better. Automating a process doesn't necessarily improve the experience, and giving users an AI assistant doesn't mean they'll know when or why to use it.
The technology might be ready. The experience, organisation and users might not.
Design teams have a bigger role to play
So, the role of designers has already started to change and I think this is where product design teams become particularly important.
Our role was never limited to designing the interface around an AI capability that somebody else has decided to build. We need to get involved much earlier, looking closely at how people actually work today, understanding their existing workflows, frustrations and behaviours, and identifying where AI could genuinely make things easier, faster or more intuitive. With product and engineering teams increasingly able to share the conceptualisation and exploration of ideas, design teams can focus more of their attention on identifying the highest-value problems to solve and where AI can deliver the greatest benefit to users.
That means getting closer to users, understanding their workflows and identifying the friction that technology could remove.
Sometimes the answer will be a conversational interface. Sometimes it will be intelligent recommendations within an existing workflow. And sometimes the best AI experience will be one the user barely notices because it quietly removes unnecessary work.
The technology should serve the experience, not dictate it.
Design teams also need to help organisations navigate the transition: experimenting with new capabilities, testing assumptions, building trust and measuring whether we're actually making things better.
AI gives us an opportunity to rethink how people interact with software. We shouldn't simply recreate existing experiences with a chatbot bolted on...
Learn alongside your users
We can't afford to spend months trying to define the perfect AI strategy while the technology and user expectations continue to evolve.
We need to experiment, learn and adapt.
Start with real problems rather than looking for somewhere to use the latest AI capability. Introduce new experiences progressively. Give users transparency and control. Measure outcomes rather than counting AI features or prompts.
And most importantly, listen.
Some users will embrace AI immediately. Others will be more cautious. Both perspectives are valuable, and our job is to understand them rather than force adoption.
This also means bringing product, design, engineering and business teams closer together. AI isn't simply another feature for a development team to deliver. It requires us to rethink experiences, workflows and sometimes entire business processes.
The opportunity is in working together
I don't believe the organisations that succeed will necessarily be those with the biggest AI budgets or earliest access to the latest models.
They'll be the ones that learn fastest, stay closest to their users and are prepared to evolve as expectations change.
AI is going to.. correction 'has already' changed how we work. The opportunity isn't simply to replace tasks or make existing processes faster.
It's to rethink what people can achieve when they have genuinely useful intelligence working alongside them. We need to adopt AI at the speed of our users, not simply at the speed of the technology, and design teams have an important role in making sure those two things move forward together.
