It’s 2026, May the 1st. The Prime Minister of Singapore is at the podium, giving an emotional speech on how the middle east conflict repatriation flight is about “leaving no Singaporean behind”. Not gonna lie, I teared a little bit too during that segment. But here’s what left quite the impression with me
“And that is why I cannot promise that there will be no disruption. Jobs will change. Some will disappear. And the pace of change will be faster than anything we have seen before.” - PM Lawrence Wong
Ok, great! Change is the only constant, y’all. Let’s look in detail how these would affect us white collar UI/UX designers in organisations.
This is immediate first trend I foresee. Designers will now need to understand in greater depth how “engineering” and “production” work. I’ve had worked with blissfully ignorant (but competent in their own ways) designers who could put forth a great pitch with quality concepts in beautiful decks. These folks can’t hide anymore, designers will need to own the ‘full-stack’ now with AI. Coding tools have now the lowest barrier of entry they ever have been, and it’ll get lower.
Your design as a designer will need to be production ready as you work with the engineering on PR reviews of your FE changes. I won’t be surprised if designers would need to be on standby to fix production issues in the near future.
The 10x effects of AI has thrown a wrench into how orgs classically manage operations. In yesteryears, people at its core drive processes (towards an output of something), and then you bring in a suitable technology to supplement whatever you’re trying to make. Fast forward to today, this relationship is being flipped. AI, is now driving processes with people thrown into the mix last.
Having taught tertiary students, it’s worrying that the AI technology development now vastly outpaces the rate of learning for ordinary humans. Between early 2024 to late 2025, the pedagogy went from “students please only use AI as an assistant to cross reference and expand your thinking” to “students if you do not use AI as an embedded process in your projects you’ll be left behind”.
Herein lies the golden problem to solve as design managers; how do we balance the need to learn new tools while creating valuable outputs for the enterprises we work for? Great design management means orchestrating a safety net for people to try these new tools/technolgy while having a flexibility for teams to adopt new processes to delivery value.
Craft is going away. I’m sad about it, but it’s reality. Machine learning has made it easy to replicate a master’s work and craft. The hard skills that made a designer unique or great will be eroded away as LLMs get smarter. What’s probably not going away would be market context and tacit industry knowledge. As designers, we must adjust and pivot our unique ‘design lens’ to own the understanding of customer habits and behaviours. While them business folks are focused on viability, we need to double down and own the desirability portion if i were to put into the DVF framework.
It’s 2026, and I don’t believe that the frontier models are actively removing designers from their value levers… at least not until RAM is cheap enough to contain an absolute ridiculous amount of context for LLMs to do their magic. So, in the mean time, how a designer is able to dissect “design tasks” into bite size pieces to agents to work on is the way to roll.
Think about it this way, now you have the opportunity to command an army of robot design interns. These interns are well apprised with adequate art school theory and techniques, but none of them have any real practical experience. How would you onboard them? How would you get them started with smaller tasks to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses? How would you get them to work in a concerted effort to produce something tangible? How are you giving them the right boundaries to prevent absolute design pandemonium? How do you NOT give away your companies trade secrets or IPs as you give them tasks to work on?
Design jobs are definitely going to change (or even go away), if you haven’t yet started in your transformational journey as a designer now, it’s the BEST time now to explore and catch up while you still can. Good luck!