Rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence and machine learning are transforming the world in many ways. For the product designer or design strategy practitioner this megatrend manifests itself in 2 orthogonal dimensions:
- AI as a product design material – AI enables solutions that are smarter, faster and can answer questions well beyond human capability alone, but you must deploy them effectively and responsibly to be successful.
- AI designing the product for you – AI generation of competent oil paintings and music based solely on a set of input requirements has been repeatedly demonstrated in the past decade. Emerging AIs can design entire digital user experiences, code them, and deploy to the cloud with one button click.
While AI automation can provide huge benefits in both megatrend dimensions it carries spectacular risk when deployed within life and death systems such as autonomous vehicles and medical products. Concurrently, generative AI for product design carries significant liability risk plus the potential of employment disruption for creative and strategic job careers.
