Disruption by Design at Cannes: How to revolutionize experience design with AI

Author: Billy Seabrook , Global Chief Design Officer, IBM Consulting

AI is fundamentally disrupting how every profession and every person works. As companies shift from experimentation to implementation at scale, we’re seeing AI’s impact go far beyond productivity. This is particularly true in design, where AI has the potential to accelerate innovation, creativity and impact for designers and marketers alike. At Cannes today, we discussed exactly that as part of a Brand Innovators Marketing Leadership Summit panel — diving into how generative AI can drive better business outcomes and enable marketing teams and creative talent to transform workflows and reimagine the creative industry as we know it.

Customer experience design is one domain where we see exceptional promise. In fact, our latest research from the IBM Institute for Business Value shows that C-suite executives rank improving customer experience as their top business priority for the next two years. AI will help designers and marketers bring hyper-personalization to bear as companies look to build trust and deepen relationships with their customers in an increasingly competitive marketplace, but the right vision, strategy and guardrails must be put in place to unlock its full potential, responsibly.

While organizations will be tasked with harnessing the potential of AI in experience design, they’ll also be tasked with mitigating the potential pitfalls — both from a cultural standpoint and a technology one. According to the new study, Disruption by Design: Evolving experiences in the age of generative AI, eight out of 10 executives predict the risks associated with generative AI outputs means designers’ project involvement will need to increase. As we like to say, AI is happening for designers, not to them.

Design teams and creatives will play a vital role in scaling the responsible adoption of AI to uphold brand standards while driving innovation. Yet, the data also reveals that while half of organizations say they are in the process of establishing an organization-wide approach for generative AI, only 5% have put this approach into practice, with the governance to monitor and measure its use.?

Harnessing the potential– while circumventing the pitfalls – of AI may seem like a daunting task for organizations, but it is a necessary one. We see three key actions leaders, managers and professionals at every stage can take to embrace disruption by design.?

For executives, set the North Star for the infusion of generative AI across the business. With a DesignOps program that serves the design principle, you can inspire corporate confidence and serve as an example for the enterprise. An established DesignOps program can elevate design as the “connective tissue” for your organization’s generative AI transformation. Executives must also consider the evolving role of designers – moving from “voice-of-the-user” to “voice-of-the-planet” and implement new ways for designers to become mixologists of generative AI models, combating creative homogeneity potentially posed by AI in design.

For creative managers, make people, not technology, central to your generative AI strategy by building a culture that values curiosity, transparency and empathy. In a machine-driven world, human-centric design will only become more important. Think strategically about downstream implications of AI for teams, end users and other business functions and infuse purposeful friction points in your creative process to reflect and recover.

For designers, become catalysts for change as skillsets converge and innovation accelerates. This new wave of the design profession will require generalists with reputation for fast and decisive content curation. Designers will evolve from having T-shaped skillsets – deep knowledge and one area with broad topline knowledge – to V-shaped skillsets – deep expertise, supported by meaningful and useful, adjacent knowledge. Designers will need to build a reputation for fast and decisive content curation, rooted in ethics and empathy to unlock new forms of business value.

Wherever you are in your AI journey, I encourage you read more in our latest report to discover how AI can transform your business and in turn your customer experience: https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-business-value/en-us/report/generative-ai-experience-design

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