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A finding from the AI in Design 2026 report worth pausing on: last year, 5% of designers said AI had decreased collaboration on their teams. This year that number is 20%. A 4x jump, in one year.

When AI generation enters a multi-brand design workflow, the first thing it does is show you exactly how well your system was actually built.

AI-generated interfaces now match human expert-designed work 44% of the time. That number comes from SAP's Chief Design Officer Arin Bhowmick, and it's been making the rounds as a proof point that AI is closing the gap on professional design output.

Many teams that adopt AI design tools follow the same pattern. Find the tool that fits the budget, get the licenses approved, run an onboarding session, and plug it into the existing workflow somewhere it can do the least damage. Intake process here. Review stage there. It works well enough to justify the spend and causes minimum disruption.

In 1865, economist William Stanley Jevons noticed something counterintuitive: as steam engines became more efficient, coal consumption went up, not down. Cheaper to run meant more reasons to run them. Efficiency created demand faster than it reduced it.

AI features have been confidently wrong often enough that users are arriving at products with their guard up. Not skeptical of everything - just no longer willing to give the benefit of the doubt by default. That's a reasonable response to a few years of interfaces that felt smart and weren't.