The Tech & Tools Designers Need to Thrive in an AI World - SXSW 2025

Video Description

This year at SXSW, our General Partner Steve Vassallo teamed up with Katie Dill, head of design at Stripe - a startup that we backed in its early stages - to discuss how AI is changing design practice. Their conversation drew on an in-depth survey that we ran in partnership with Designer Fund, which gathered insights from nearly 400 design professionals at companies including Anthropic, OpenAI, Perplexity, Spotify, and Dropbox. Chapters: - 00:00 Opening - 02:42 AI's impact on design - 06:45 Collaboration challenges - 10:04 Inside Stripe - how Katie’s team uses AI - 13:13 Adoption at startups versus incumbents - 21:53 The designer’s evolving role - 25:24 The future of design careers - 28:17 Developing taste - what is excellent design? - 32:51 Beauty - subjective or objective? - 36:45 How to upskill with AI tools - 40:24 From “filming plays” to “making movies” Main takeaways: Steve and Katie explored how AI's role shifts throughout the design process - acting as a "brainstorm kickstarter" during early exploration, a "prototyping partner" during creation, and a "hand-off helper" during delivery. Our survey data reveals that early-stage startups are adopting AI at more than 2x the rate of public companies and achieving revenue milestones significantly faster as a result. Rather than the doom-and-gloom narrative of AI replacing designers, Steve and Katie described how AI is reorienting the designer's role toward direction, curation, and the application of uniquely human judgment. The two advised designers to gain technical fluency with AI tools while also cultivating the distinctly human capabilities - taste, critical evaluation, and deep user empathy - that complement what machines do well.  Katie also shared how Stripe's design team is developing new ways to maintain and evolve their brand identity. As AI makes "good enough" design more accessible to everyone, the bar for truly exceptional design rises higher. Far from settling for automated adequacy, Stripe uses AI as an amplifier for human creativity - a means of scaling excellence versus simply scaling production. The two closed with a compelling analogy about our current moment. When a new technology emerges, the initial tendency is to retrofit it onto existing processes - like the first "movies" that were simply recorded theatrical performances. This represents the "filming plays" approach: using AI to make current workflows marginally better or more efficient but not fundamentally reimagining what's possible.  The more revolutionary approach - "making movies" - involves building products and experiences that would be impossible without the new technology. Just as cinema eventually developed its own language of cuts, zooms, and special effects that went far beyond what was available to theater, AI-native products reimagine what's possible rather than bolting onto what already exists. The most exciting frontiers in design aren't about AI-powered versions of existing products, but entirely new creative approaches that blend human and machine capabilities in novel ways. These innovations - the ones that are paradigm-defining rather than incrementally better - represent the 100x opportunities rather than the 10x ones.