A few years ago, "design brainstorming" looked pretty familiar: a whiteboard, sticky notes everywhere, maybe some heated debates about which idea deserved to move forward.
Fast forward to today, and many of those sticky notes have been replaced by prompts typed into MidJourney, Figma AI, or ChatGPT. Instead of staring at a blank screen, you get ten potential directions in seconds.
That’s not just efficiency, it’s a shift in how creativity itself is happening.
AI is surprisingly good at divergent thinking, the messy, wide-angle exploration of possibilities that usually eats up a lot of designer brain cycles.
Need fresh design variations? AI can spit out dozens in minutes.
Looking for edge-case flows? AI can simulate scenarios you might not even think of until a frustrated user files a support ticket.
Prototyping? It can stitch together early drafts that would normally take hours.
This can feel like rocket fuel. Teams can iterate faster, test more options, and ship with greater confidence. Instead of arguing over “the one” design, you can explore five, test them, and let the data guide you.
The risk is that if everyone relies on the same AI engines for their first draft, outputs start to converge. Suddenly, that fresh, bold new flow feels…familiar.
Think of it like stock photography. At first, it was liberating, cheap, accessible, and fast. But pretty quickly, every SaaS landing page looked the same: two people pointing at a laptop, a neon sticky note on the wall, a perfectly diverse “team” giving a thumbs up.
Homogenization doesn’t kill usability, but it does flatten the brand. And in competitive SaaS markets, sameness is the enemy.
The truth is, AI isn’t the problem. It’s how we use it.
As an enhancer: AI can accelerate the grunt work, expanding options, mocking prototypes, uncovering gaps, freeing humans to double down on nuance, context, and storytelling.
As an eroder: If teams treat AI as the final say instead of a starting point, you end up with design karaoke, singing someone else’s tune, slightly off-key.
The question isn’t “Should we use AI in design?” That ship has sailed. The real question is:
“Are we using AI to expand our creative range, or to outsource our judgment?”
AI can hand you ten ideas, know which one resonates with your market, aligns with your strategy, and feels uniquely you.
So let the bots do the heavy lifting. But remember: craft, taste, and context are still human territory.
The best products in the next decade won’t just be AI-generated. They’ll be AI-accelerated but human-curated. That’s where differentiation and delight still live.
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