By emphasizing design's role as a producer of visual outputs, our leaders have eroded the entire justification for UX as a practice.
Fear is choking out thoughtfulness in tech, and it can't be replaced with "more productivity" — because productivity is not what motivates corporate layoffs.
When outputs are valued above all else, hallucinations and slop aren't bugs — they're features.
LLMs are not the first tool to promise that they can free us from having to talk to people so we can "focus on the work." But talking to people IS the work.
Tech companies are only pretending to innovate, through copying futuristic aesthetics from science fiction without understanding their purpose.
Industry leaders like Apple and Shopify are redefining design excellence from making products usable to solely luxury branding.
Tech orgs only function thanks to people who volunteer for thankless "glue work." This is the space where UX lives; for the field to get respect we need to make this work visible.
Some leaders are starting to realize the extent to which AI has broken their ability to prioritize and ship value. Others are still doubling down.
As managers continue to outsource data-gathering and decision-making to LLMs, the person above you on the org chart is transforming into a chatbot's clerk – and leaving product teams with the consequences.
Leaders who surrender their point of view inevitably arrive at the same conclusion: we must solve every problem for every user. This approach demolishes the possibility of real impact.
The dream of being able to generate working websites will remain out of reach until UX redefines its practice around semantic structure rather than layouts.
Unmoored from user needs as the driver for decision-making, executives increasingly perform innovation for their peers. Today, that means AI products and AI workflows – no matter the cost.
