# AI & Design Practice · Jose Romero

With AI in the room, the bottleneck moves from generating options to making sense of them, and structuring that is design work.

Source: https://www.joseromerodesign.com/thinking/positions/ai-and-design-practice/

AI & Design Practice

# AI has changed how much of a design job is thinking versus doing, more than most people have noticed.

Published June 2026 · Updated October 2026

What I've been exploring over the past year is what happens when you introduce AI into a design process that was already complex, specifically, the Shape Up methodology my team uses at IKEA. Shape Up asks people to hold a lot of context, make judgment calls on incomplete information, and move quickly through shaping decisions that have long downstream consequences.

AI can process and produce information faster than any team can absorb it. Which means the bottleneck shifts. The work moves from generating options to making sense of them: having enough shared context to evaluate what the AI has produced and decide what to do with it.

The hard part turned out to be human: getting an AI-assisted process to produce output that's actually useful instead of just plentiful, building in checkpoints at the moments that actually need human judgment, and keeping a room full of people from getting buried in AI-generated text and losing track of the decision they were actually there to make.

All of that is facilitation work. Which, it turns out, is design work too.

[Read the full framework →](https://www.joseromerodesign.com/thinking/ai-workflow-framework/)

_AI moves where judgment is needed. The bottleneck shifts from generation to sense-making, and structuring that process is a design problem._

## Other positions

- Positional Empathy In enterprise work, the empathy that moves projects forward is positional.

- Behavioural Economics Most design decisions are really behavioural decisions wearing a visual disguise.

- Resilient Systems The best process is one that doesn't depend on any single person to remember it.

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