Leadership By Design 2026
What’s Yours to Keep: Designing alongside AI without giving up the work that made you a designer.
You think AI is coming for design. I’m not going to tell you it isn’t; I’m going to tell you what it’s coming for and what it can’t touch. These are two very different piles, and the second one has your name on it.
The artifacts go in the first pile, because a model can produce the screens, the decks, and the prototypes, fast and almost good enough. The second pile holds the judgment that picks the right one, and judgment is a muscle: when you stop using, atrophies.
This talk gives you a test you can run tomorrow for sorting your own work into those piles, then gets practical about leading a mixed team of designers and agents. An LLM is an intern with infinite confidence and stamina and no taste. Somebody still has to know good from almost good, and that somebody is a designer.
