There's a lot of noise around AI in the creative industry right now. Depending on who you listen to, it's either going to replace designers entirely or it's a glorified autocomplete that produces nothing worth keeping. The truth, as usual, sits somewhere in the middle.

I've been experimenting with AI tools in my workflow for a while now. Not because it's fashionable, but because understanding what these tools can and can't do feels like a professional responsibility at this point. The industry is moving. You either move with it or you get left behind explaining why you didn't.

So here's what I've actually found useful:

A mix of Gemini and Claude has become a regular part of how I work through problems. Not to write copy or make decisions, but to think out loud. To stress test an idea, reframe a brief, or get a second opinion on a direction. It's a useful thinking partner, as long as you remember that it doesn't actually know your client, your brief, or your industry the same way that you do.

For ideation and early exploration, AI is genuinely helpful. Tools like Midjourney, Nano Banana and Adobe Firefly can generate visual references and mood directions at a speed that would take hours to pull together manually. It's not the finished work, and it was never going to be. But as a way of getting ideas out of your head and onto a screen quickly, it's hard to argue with.

Figma Weave is something I've been exploring recently - a node based platform that connects AI models and editing tools into a single seamless workflow. Weave starts to bring all the conversational and generative Ai into one place. It's early days in my exploration, but the idea of end to end AI assisted workflows that a designer can actually control and direct is where I think the real opportunity lies. Not AI doing the work, but AI making the whole process faster, more connected, and easier to scale.

Where AI falls short is anywhere that requires genuine creative judgment. Taste. Restraint, Knowing when something is working and when it isn't. Those things come from experience and context that no model currently has. The work that comes out of AI tools unedited tends to look like it too. Polished on the surface, but somehow empty underneath.

The designers who will do best with AI are the ones who use it to go further and faster, while keeping their own judgment firmly in charge. It's a tool (a genuinely useful one), but the thinking still has to be yours.