What is AI-led design?

How to move fast without breaking the design process.

With Figma going public this week, I thought I’d reflect on the state of design and where I see AI influencing the processes used by the world’s best designers.

When I started my career at one of the world’s largest mobile dev shops, Piotr Gajos taught me the design-led engineering process: gather requirements, create the information architecture, create wireframes, and finally add the visual design — the pretty stuff.

I’ve worked with dozens of designers and design shops, which more or less followed some variation of this process. But over time, I noticed designers started skipping the rest to “save time.” First, they dove into wireframes without producing an information architecture — because most business leaders don’t understand this phase. Then, they began jumping straight to visual design, making clickable prototypes with InVision.

Then, Figma came along and ate InVision’s lunch (sorry, Clark Valberg, InVision was awesome). With Figma, executives could comment and make changes directly in the designs. So, slowly but surely, the design process has become focused on visual design, at the expense of user experience.

I’ve lost count of the number of truly stunning product designs I’ve seen that were utterly unusable.

Now comes the next big shift: AI-led design — and we’re already screwing it up.

What’s AI-Led Design’s current trajectory?

With tools like Base44, Loveable, Replit, and Blink.New, anyone can become a developer — skipping the design process entirely. Based on the best designs I’ve seen from these tools, I don’t have much hope for the future of design unless we define a better process — starting now.

Where does AI-Led Design need to go?

First, we must answer this question about integrating AI into our products:

What can we do now that we couldn’t do before?

In many cases, the answer is surprisingly simple: Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS). Shazam, an early AI pioneer, had an app with one button. Today, we’re trying to weld together legacy systems and LLMs. Starting with a blank sheet feels daunting — especially for enterprise apps. But, if AI can remove the complexity of the UX, then a paper prototype might be 3-10 sheets of printer paper — not 387.

The ideal process should look like this diagram.

Here’s what a better AI-led design process could look like:

Step 1: Design your product on paper

Grab a stack of printer paper, scissors, and a black pen. Create your prototype in 10–30 minutes. It’s faster than you think — and totally fine if you can’t draw well. Just stick to the process.

If AI is handling most of the heavy lifting behind the scenes, you won’t need to draw dozens of pages. Once you’ve sketched the key screens, capture pictures or a video of your prototype, and move on to step two.

Step 2: Upload a video or images of your paper sketches to a low-fidelity AI prototype builder

This tool may not exist yet — but maybe someone will build it after reading this post. The goal is to turn your sketches into a simple, interactive prototype you can show to customers.

It should feel more like Balsamiq than a polished Figma design. Keep the focus on user experience and the content, not visual finesse.

Step 3: Add the shiny bits — the visual design

With the push of a button, your low-fidelity mockup becomes a high-fidelity product. That button should let you apply a visual style — either one you choose or one based on your brand’s style guide.

Maybe the backend gets built automatically, too. Maybe not. But that’s not the point — the design comes first.

After every step: Test with real customers

Test. Test. Test. Find people who match your ideal customer profile — and keep testing. Keep going until customers start pre-paying for the product.

This isn’t a complete guide to AI-Led Design, but I hope it serves as a blueprint to help move the digital design industry forward.