Corporate crisis is design’s opportunity

As someone guiding design leaders and their teams through this rapidly changing era of AI and automation, it’s my responsibility to understand their vulnerabilities and the ways they can get ahead. To gain this insight, I spoke to friends and colleagues who are in operations, in finance, C-suite, and management consultants.

What emerged was an understanding that right now, businesses are being blindly driven to use AI for efficiency, at the expense of everything else. They aren’t looking past current quarterly earnings, and they have little awareness of the vulnerability the last decade has left them in. New startup competitors are poised to topple their leadership and also their relevance. As we recently saw with Ford’s reaction to the advances in Chinese vehicles, competition is coming. 

What’s more, businesses stand to gain a secret weapon to help them into the AI era: designers.

The consequences of a decade of efficiency

While not visible on the surface, the decade of efficiency is not future-proof and comes with its own set of consequences. The cracks are visible for those looking. 

The areas that have been weakened by long-term cuts are:

1. Customer experience
2. Culture & workforce morale 
3. Infrastructure 

Customer experience

The nearly singular focus on shareholder return created the unintended consequence of  neglecting the customer. As Forrester revealed in its 2024 CX Index, “Customer Experience quality in the US falls to an all time low.” While it reduced the cost of doing business, automating customer service for the most part has not improved service. In most cases, it has made it worse. The promise of technology promised a new connection with the customer, but it ended up becoming a wall between the business and the customer instead. 

Culture & workforce morale

If businesses have lost their focus on customers, their treatment of their workforce hasn’t been any better. In an era with continued cuts, layoffs, and the ever-present message that AI is coming for your job, employees are focused on survival, the innovation muscle has atrophied, and any sense of urgency has given way to exhaustion and complacency. After years of neglect and demoralization, businesses are going to turn to this same workforce to pivot to their most competitive state they’ve ever been in.

Infrastructure

Most businesses are siloed and fragmented by nature, organized into business units and grown through mergers and acquisitions. Corporate infrastructure lives in these silos, becoming more and more fragmented. Over the last decade, when the focus shifted to efficiency, businesses focused on integrating experiences and services, but didn’t allocate enough funds to truly overhaul infrastructure. The result is that mission-critical services are strung together on infrastructures that have hit their breaking point. And with the introduction of AI, companies are being developed into even more silos, adding more chaos to these environments.

The crisis/opportunity

This scenario presents the ideal opportunity for design to reset our value in organizations. One of the main reasons that businesses aren’t moving headlong into AI is that it’s too monolithic to understand. This is an opportunity for design to provide what it does best and what every business needs — a vision for embracing AI that is centered around their customers again. 

Every business will face a competitor that will threaten its leadership or even its existence in the coming years. Nearly every business will face its competitor while it is at its weakest. Very few companies are aware of this at the moment. 

It is critical that the sooner companies start their AI journey, the better prepared they will be. 

Every leader needs to embrace 2 basic truths:

• Truth 1 (Crisis): Leaders have never been more vulnerable to lose their customers, workforce, and market force. 

• Truth 2 (Opportunity): There has never been a better time to steal everyone’s customers and employees. 

What’s next?

Every organization knows that they will have to transform using AI, but into what? AI has ushered in a climate of fear, and to move beyond it, designers need to replace the question what Will AI take away? with What future can AI create? 

Companies need a vision for how to improve their customer experience. Creating innovative ideas for how to apply AI for the benefit of real people is the problem design has been waiting for. This is our moment to shine.

At its best, design combines a vision and an actionable strategy. It is best-suited to ideate in the unknown and emerge with meaning for humans and opportunities for businesses. 
Designers will need to come to the table in a way that we haven’t done in a long time — boldly, maybe without permission, and with immediate, concrete steps for business to take. If we do it right, we’ll lead the conversation.