Remember the planet Camazotz from A Wrinkle in Time? Meg and Charles Wallace travel there to find their father. The first thing they see on Camazotz is every child bounces a ball in perfect unison, every house looks the same. They soon discover that everyone on this planet lives under the control of a giant collective brain—IT. IT’s efficient. IT’s orderly. IT removes our need for diversity in thinking, because IT handles all the thinking for us.
Sound familiar?
There is no doubt that AI is moving at breakneck speed. New tools drop daily. Bold predictions flood your LinkedIn feed. In the design space, we see daily posts asking, “Will AI replace UX designers?”—usually with a tone that implies it’s not if, but when.
Back in the engineering space, the CEO of Anthropic even claimed that 100% of code will be written by AI by 2026. There is going to be a huge impact on the dev space for sure, but here’s why that’s not true: while AI can generate code quickly, it lacks the understanding needed to build reliable, scalable systems. It doesn’t grasp business goals, user context, or technical constraints—it simply predicts what code might work based on patterns.
As a result, AI-generated code often breaks, bloats, or creates technical debt. It may look right but it fails in practice because it wasn’t written with strategic thinking or system awareness.
And just like with design, when everything starts to feel the same (or actually starts breaking) people will return to the developers (and designers) who can ask the right questions, solve real problems, and build with intention.
At The Growth UX Studio, we don’t subscribe to a doomsday mentality. We believe in people and have an ‘everything-is-figure-outable’ mentality. So maybe the better question to “Will AI replace UX designers?” is “How will UX designers use AI to do more of what makes them irreplaceable?”
Don’t worry, Henny Penny, the sky is not falling; it’s just a big, shiny new tool
As a UX studio, we’ve felt the fomo and pressure to try every tool, stay on the cutting edge, and “AI-ify” our workflow.
Here’s what we found: trying these tools was yet another grounding reminder: tools don’t replace talent; they support it. You start to see what these tools can help with, where their limits are, and what isn’t worth your time.
For us, trying these tools was yet another grounding reminder: tools don’t replace talent; they support it.
“Teach your child AI or they won’t survive.”
Speaking of predictions, there’s a similar wave hitting parents and educators, which we’ll summarize as, “Teach your kid AI tools now or their future is cooked, they’ll be too behind.”
We don’t buy it.
The best designers of the future (and the best thinkers in general) won’t be the ones who memorized the most tools in 2025.
They’ll be the ones who know how to ask the right questions, connect the dots, and think across systems. You can help children develop those skills more effectively by teaching them music, allowing them to explore nature openly, and learning to solve problems creatively. No tech is necessary.
The way we see it, AI will naturally make its way into the appropriate channels and curricula for people of all skill and knowledge levels to learn.
A healthy, curious kid who has had the chance to be a kid, think critically, and problem-solve will learn and adapt to any tool as a medium.
TL;DR: Tools will continue to evolve. Skills like curiosity, adaptability, and creative problem-solving won’t.
What AI Is Already Doing (And Doing Well)
At The Growth UX Studio, we utilize AI every day as a productivity partner that helps our creative team move faster and work more effectively. It’s integrated into our workflow, and we’re grateful for it.
Here are some examples of how it’s working for us:
- Design ideation and prototyping. We use tools like Claude to help sketch early wireframes, and Figma Make feature to prototype and test higher-fidelity ideas quickly.
- Calendar and productivity support. Motion helps us auto-prioritize deep work, manage client timelines, and stay focused without spending hours juggling schedules.
- Meeting intelligence. Fireflies records our meetings and tracks action items, decisions, and historical context, ensuring that nothing gets lost and projects move forward with confidence. (We’ve also replaced Zoom recordings with Fireflies recordings, which we attach to every meeting invite. Keeping everything historically documented is *chef’s kiss*.
- Research synthesis. AI-powered research tools help us quantify qualitative feedback, highlight sentiment patterns, and spot trends across interviews—giving us a faster starting point for deeper synthesis and insight. For example, we use Perplexity to analyze public forums like Reddit and app store reviews of competitors to quantify positive and negative feedback and extract words and patterns it finds.
- Documentation and follow-up. This one’s pretty much a given: AI assists with creating summaries, recaps, and project documentation, allowing us to maintain momentum without getting bogged down in admin work. (We don’t use AI-generated copy directly in client-facing communications or user-facing project work, but we love it for our own documentation.)
In short, the AI tools we’ve grown to love reduce manual noise and let us spend more energy on strategy, creativity, and connection—which is exactly where great, human-centered design takes place.
AI Is a Great Parrot. But Here’s What It Can’t Do:
AI is great at speeding up execution. But execution was never the whole job.
Design is a lot more than UI and drawing boxes on a screen. True UX design is about framing and solving meaningful problems, identifying opportunities, and aligning people.
You still need humans to:
- Do the strategic thinking. Balancing business needs, user goals, and technical constraints requires a context-driven and systems-thinking approach.
- Navigate complexity. Designers often serve as mediators between stakeholders, departments, and differing opinions.
- Go deeper than summaries. Tools can synthesize research, but the most valuable insights live in nuance—the pauses in user testing, the contradictions, the unsaid.
- Bring taste and storytelling. Good design is felt. Usability is deeply connected to brand, emotion, clarity, and trust.
Lack of Diversity Is Shaping “Sameness” in Product Design
Like on Camazotz, when we rely only on the same tools, templates, and auto-generated layouts, we strip meaning from the products we use every day.
The best Products and features we have designed were born from collaborative and diverse thinking.
Without that, we end up building more products that solve fewer deep problems (all the while offering less and less human support). It isn’t hard to figure out which products will stand out: the better usable ones, designed with care, and informed by real human feedback.
That’s why UX designers who think like strategists will be in higher demand. Will AI replace UX Designers? No. But it will replace UX-ers that lack vision, depth, or direction.
Designers who lead with clarity, critical thinking, and business fluency are becoming more essential than ever.
A Better Way to Collaborate with AI and People
One of our studio’s core values is collaborative work. And we’ve found that AI can actually help make collaboration more accessible.
In traditional workshops, “design-led” often comes with unintended hierarchy.
But we’ve found that when we bring AI tools like Bolt or Claude into the process, something shifts. STakeholders can help us prompt, which helps them feel like they’re driving together with us.
Simplified, here’s what the process looks like:
- Gather product requirements from PMs, devs, marketing, etc.
- Use AI to generate rough ideas—live, together, in a workshop setting.
- Reflect ideas back in real time. Iterate fast, get feedback, move forward.
This results in more transparency and shared ownership of the product direction. And camaraderie, which is always a good thing because, at the end of the day, we work with and for other people.
Neurodiverse Thinking: The Unexpected Advantage in an AI World
In a landscape of automation, sameness, and predictability, what becomes the edge?
Different thinking.
We’ve written before about the value of neurodiverse UX designers:
- If You Really Want to Change the World, Hire More Autistic UX Designers
- If You Want to Save Your Business, Hire More Autistic UX Designers to Design Your AI Products
Here’s why, in a nutshell: neurodivergent designers often bring superpowers that today’s AI-driven world can’t replicate, including:
- Spotting patterns others miss
- Thinking laterally under pressure
- Sustaining focus and systems-level insight
- Deep, out-of-the-box thinking
So, Will AI Replace UX Designers?
Not the ones who ask better questions than AI can answer. Curiosity is your AI product moat.
Design will never disappear. As humans, we will continue to design and evolve—just as tools will continue to evolve.
AI can generate apps, content, and deliverables, but you still need a human to design meaning, direction, and trust.
Final thoughts:
Hire designers who think critically, strategically, and empathetically. That’s how you build products that last and protect your moat in the AI age.
Ready to stand out? Let’s talk, we’ll be here all day.
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