When product teams move 10x faster because of AI, traditional waterfall (and even agile) doesn’t work. But the absence of a defined handoff and critique can do real damage if you’re not careful. Devs are solving this with AI-assisted code reviews; designers have been left hanging. Meanwhile, I noticed that when designers started coding with AI, their results were usually stronger than developers’, using the same models and same projects.

Design had to move into the same integrated AI coding workflow and adopt the vocabulary a design director uses. That observation became Impeccable: an open-source design tool that bundles 23 adjective commands (“bolder,” “quieter,” “distill,” “critique”), automatically catches and prevents AI design slop (the nested cards, purple gradients, and rounded icon tiles), and lets you visually iterate in the browser against your real running production codebase. No canvas. No handoff. No translation. Join me for a live demo of Impeccable, a new design method any team can adopt this week.

AI is dramatically changing how engineering works (code is cheap now), and UX people of all sorts are figuring out how they fit in this new way of building.

Evals are a place where UX professionals can leverage their skills in this new world, and in this talk, Peter shares how he’s used this method to help organizations create outsized value.

This talk is both practical and strategic. You will learn strategically how to position yourself or your team as key to new AI initiatives, and we will go through some hands-on skills understanding and creating evals.

Launched just a few weeks ago, AI in Design 2026 is one of the largest studies to date examining how AI is reshaping design teams, craft, and tools. Published by Designer Fund and Foundation Capital, the report explores questions many design leaders and practitioners are asking right now: Which AI tools are seeing the most adoption? How are design workflows evolving? Are hiring expectations and team structures changing in meaningful ways?

In this session, Ben Blumenrose will unpack the report’s key findings and discuss what they may mean for the future of design. The research draws on survey responses from more than 900 designers across 60+ countries, alongside in-depth interviews with the design teams at Anthropic, Framer, Linear, Notion, Shopify, Sierra, and Stripe.

Designers in complex domains like finance, healthcare, or government are often asked to design for expert workflows they barely understand, while their subject-matter experts are too busy to join every iteration. This case study shows how niche AI “agent personas” became an always-available, domain-aware first pass on ideas—helping a UX professional in fintech to pressure-test concepts, understand upstream/downstream impacts, and arrive at better prototypes faster. In this work, AI serves explicitly as a pre-research layer, not a substitute for real users, formal research, or usability testing, ensuring that human insight remains at the center of the design process.

This case study explores what happens when generative AI moves off the screen and into a physical, walk-up-and-play game. Built by a team of four non-engineers, the project used AI to design and prototype everything from game logic to custom 3D-printed and laser-cut controllers. While AI accelerated early exploration, it repeatedly failed in physical space, where sensor noise, variability, and real players exposed its limits. The case study focuses on how designing for failure, constraints, and recovery ultimately mattered more than making the AI smarter, and what this reveals about trust, responsibility, and design judgment when AI becomes part of a real-world interactive system.

The handoff is dead. For decades, the road from idea to working product ran through translators. Designers created UI sketches. Engineers interpreted. What shipped was always a relative of the original vision, never quite the vision itself.

AI-assisted development is rewriting the contract. Kiro, an agentic IDE built around specification, puts the power to build in the hands of the person who already holds the intent. The design.md spec becomes the design output. Static mocks become shippable code. No relay, no translation, no slow erosion of meaning between rooms.

In this session, Rikki Teeters takes an idea from spec to functioning product live on stage. You will watch the spec take shape, see Kiro build against it, and feel the moment a concept becomes code in real time. Expect a working grasp of Kiro, a new frame for the spec as the most consequential artifact a designer makes, and one question worth carrying home. When execution is no longer someone else’s job, what will you build first?

The dramatic rise of OpenClaw hints at a future where AI doesn’t just generate text: it owns tasks.  In this panel, hear how designers are inventing new ways of working with AI agents, from AI “chiefs of staff” to their very own production crew.  Together they’ll speculate what the agent shift signals for designers today, and how we can prepare for a more agentic future.

AI didn’t emerge from nowhere—it’s built on decisions that concentrate power in the hands of a few. As creators, we can’t design responsibly without seeing those systems clearly. In this featured presentation, Anil Dash challenges UX designers and product leaders to confront who benefits from today’s AI landscape—and to imagine new ways of designing that return power, agency, and dignity to the people and communities we serve.