Everyone Designs Now. That's Why Design Expertise Is Worth More, Not Less.

Open an AI design tool and you can generate a passable screen in seconds. A flow. A prototype. A first pass at an entire product. The barrier to producing something that looks designed has basically collapsed.

So here's the conclusion nearly everyone reaches: design is getting commoditized. If a PM can prompt their way to a UI, why keep specialists around?

The data says the opposite. And the gap between the fear and the data is where the real story is.

On a recent episode of the Fuego UX podcast, we sat down with Andrew Hogan, who analyzes the design and product market at Figma — after seven years doing the same work at Forrester, and a start in agency research before that. He describes his job as research on research: reading the whole industry and handing people back one clear view of it.

His read on this moment is blunt. More people are designing than ever. And design expertise is becoming more valuable, not less. Both are true at once. Here's why.

The blurring is real — and bigger than you think

Start with the part that scares people, because it's genuine.

"56% of non-designers do a lot of design tasks. We've measured this."
Andrew Hogan | Fuego UX Podcast

Roles are dissolving. The PM prototypes. The engineer tweaks the interaction. The marketer ships a landing page. AI made every one of those handoffs shorter, and in a lot of cases erased them. Hogan traces it to a bigger shift — more software being built by more people, faster:

"There are more apps being created than ever before… how do you differentiate between all of these different things being created? We kind of call it the rise of the app layer. And that requires design. Design is the differentiator."
Andrew Hogan | Fuego UX Podcast

Read that twice, because it contains the whole argument. More apps, made faster, by more people, does not lower the value of design. It raises it. When everyone can ship, shipping isn't the differentiator anymore. The quality of the thing is.

The counterintuitive data point

Here's the number that breaks the "design is commoditized" thesis.

Engineering managers — the people who supposedly need designers less now that their teams can prompt — say design matters more than it did two years ago, according to IDC data Hogan cites.

Sit with that. The people closest to the tooling, the ones best positioned to conclude "we've got this covered now," are the ones raising design's stock. They're watching non-designers produce more design output, and deciding they need design judgment more, not less.

Why? Because producing a screen and knowing whether it's the right screen are different skills. AI closed the gap on the first one and did almost nothing for the second.

What AI still can't do (and where the value moved)

When we asked Hogan what actually separates people now, he didn't point at production. He pointed at the parts of design that sit above the pixels:

"Figuring out how to do things that AI really doesn't do well — information architecture, designing within a larger context… working on how to give that context to AI is an extreme superpower."
Andrew Hogan | Fuego UX Podcast

Two things live in that sentence.

Information architecture and context. AI generates locally. It makes this screen, this component, this flow. It has no opinion about how the whole system hangs together, what belongs where, or what the user is trying to accomplish three steps from now. That's design work, and it got harder to fake, not easier.

Giving AI the context. The new leverage isn't producing the artifact — it's knowing what to ask for and being able to tell whether what came back is any good. Which brings us to the skill that quietly became everything.

Taste is the bottleneck now

Hogan's sharpest point was about judgment. The first draft used to be the expensive part. Now it's free:

"I can get a first draft in 10 seconds if I really want one. But is the first draft good? What is it missing? What is it doing?"
Andrew Hogan | Fuego UX Podcast

That's the whole game in two questions. When generation is instant, the constraint stops being can you make it and becomes can you tell if it's right. And that — knowing what good looks like, what moves people, what a design is missing — is the one thing AI can't hand you.

"The single biggest thing is to refine what you think of as good. Really hone what is good design. What moves people?"
Andrew Hogan | Fuego UX Podcast

This is why the blurring doesn't threaten expert designers. It relocates their value. The expert isn't the only person who can make a screen anymore. They're the person who can look at forty AI-generated screens and know which one is right, why, and what the other thirty-nine are missing.

What this means if you lead a team

If you run product, the temptation right now is to read the role-blurring trend as a headcount opportunity. Everyone can design a little, so maybe you need fewer designers.

That's the exact wrong lesson. When Figma IPO'd, they framed it as design is everyone's business — design at the heart of the whole company. That's not a reason to cut design. It's a reason to raise the design floor everywhere and protect the design ceiling: the senior judgment that decides what's actually worth building.

The teams that win the app-layer race won't be the ones who generated the most screens. They'll be the ones who knew which screens to keep.