Smashing Magazine: The bull and bear case for digital design in the age of AI
Andy Budd’s July 2026 article on Smashing Magazine offers one of the more sober frameworks for thinking about AI’s impact on the design profession — not as a single dramatic disruption, but as a divergence that plays out differently depending on the people, teams, and organizations involved.
The bull case starts with autonomy. Budd argues that AI removes the dependency chain that has historically slowed designers down. Instead of waiting for a PM to write a ticket, an engineer to implement a fix, or a stakeholder to approve a prototype, a designer with AI tools can now move from brief to working output on their own. This shift could be especially significant for designers with strong product instincts who have felt constrained by the traditional separation of roles. Budd sees a path where the best designers step into hybrid positions — closer to product leadership — and deliver more directly because the execution gap between their ideas and deployable code has narrowed considerably.
The bear case is where the argument becomes more unsettling. AI does not just give designers more capability — it also gives non-designers more capability. Product managers and engineers can now produce what Budd calls “plausible design”: work that looks coherent, ships without friction, and clears an internal bar, even if it lacks the strategic depth or research grounding a designer would have brought. In organizations under cost or speed pressure, plausible design may be treated as good enough. The result would be fewer designers in the room, with those who remain relegated to governance and quality review rather than origination.
The central observation is that AI exposes rather than creates professional gaps. Many designers have been skilled at noticing what is wrong with existing work. Fewer have regularly practiced deciding what should replace it — because that decision was often made by someone else in the process. Budd’s point is that organizational structure has, in some cases, been covering for a narrower skill set. When AI removes that structure, the coverage goes with it.
His conclusion is that both futures can unfold at the same time, in different companies and across different designers within the same company. The designers who do well, he writes, “will not be the ones who merely use AI to produce more options. Options are cheap now. They will be the ones who know which option is worth pursuing, why it matters, how to test it, what to cut, where the product is lying to itself.”
The article is useful reading for designers trying to assess their own positioning — not as a prediction to agree or disagree with, but as a precise account of which capabilities hold value once execution cost falls. The capabilities it identifies as durable — product judgment, commercial awareness, the ability to evaluate as much as generate — are ones worth auditing honestly against your current practice.