Welcome to the inaugural issue of the Design Executive Briefing—a new monthly intelligence briefing for leaders, executives and CEOs navigating business innovation and competition in the AI era. In this first issue, we surface opportunities as companies navigate the AI buildout phase.

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Design Executive Briefing 01

Design in the AI era

We’ve entered a new business era. One where AI isn’t something CEOs are cautiously exploring—it’s the #1 lever for growth, and the centerpiece of every strategic conversation.

To anchor our discussion, we’re using the Blackrock AI evolution framework:

• Phase 1 - Buildout: The first phase is the race to build the infrastructure AI needs.
• Phase 2 - Adoption: As infrastructure grows and AI applications mature, adoption is likely to accelerate – packaged into different apps and software.
• Phase 3 – Transformation: This phase is where companies could unlock the full value of AI adoption, as broad productivity gains and new business models and industries emerge.

Over the next few briefings, we will dive deeper into how companies need to resolve both buildout, adoption, and transformation activities to reap the benefits they are looking for from AI. For this one, we’ll start with a foundational discussion between buildout and adoption.

The reality check. Most big companies are still in the buildout phase while some are shifting to the adoption phase. For most large organizations, the immediate focus is a mix of foundational infrastructure upgrades and early use case experimentation. While the cloud revolution pushed many companies to become more digital, 70% of Fortune 500 companies still operate in mainframes. Despite holding vast datasets that could power a competitive edge, most established firms still run on fragmented systems that can’t fully support modern AI pipelines.

The ambition. 96% of NYSE 100 CEOs see AI as an opportunity, not a risk. Nearly half are already investing to become market leaders in at least one AI use-case. And yet, despite this overwhelming belief in AI’s potential, one of the top concerns among CEOs of the largest US public companies? “We’re moving too slowly.” If you're feeling this intense pacing at work today, this might be the clue from the top.

Our research shows that CEOs and Boards aren’t questioning if AI will create value—they’re wrestling with how to unlock it. The business case is no longer up for debate. The real challenge now is determining where to invest and how to apply AI in ways that drive meaningful impact.

That’s not just a technology problem. That’s a strategic clarity problem.

And clarity is what any effective design leader needs to bring forth.

Clarity against questions like:

• What are the real customer problems and use cases worth solving?
• Which of those can we address in a way that’s meaningfully differentiated and defensible?
• How can we design solutions that create durable business value—not just features?
• Where, exactly, should we apply our capabilities to have the greatest impact today and tomorrow?
• And what infrastructure do we need to deliver on that vision? How far away are we? How might we create value today, while also building for the future?

When design leads these questions, clarity follows. And with clarity comes speed. But it is not so simple in practice, as clarity in thought does not always mean readiness in the enterprise. This is where we must operate with realism and idealism hand-in-hand.

Marrying business, customer and AI-driven approaches for success

Using Christian Rohrer, VP of Human-Centered Design at TD Bank's definition of strategic design, he shares that "Strategic Design is the art and science of discovering, validating and building new ways of meeting user needs that creates an advantage or success over competitors."

That last phrase—“success over competitors”—is key. It shifts the conversation from design as delight to design as differentiation.

Strategic design leadership requires more than creative intuition. It demands the ability to pair customer insight with strategic thinking, market analysis, and business rationale. Design leaders must be able to assess not only what customers need, but also whether a proposed solution makes business sense.

One of the biggest challenges designers face as they rise into executive roles is strengthening that second muscle: the ability to articulate how design creates value beyond experience. That includes developing instincts for financial impact, competitive dynamics, and scalable business models.

It means asking:

• Does this solution improve margins by driving operational efficiency?
• Can it reduce cost through smarter supply chain or technology leverage?
• Will it increase market demand or unlock a new revenue stream?
• And ultimately—will it give us a lasting competitive edge?
  

On strategic clarity: this is one dimension of what separates designers from strategic design leaders: the ability to zoom out and make the business case—not just for what should be built, but for why it matters.

With AI, the energy has shifted. AI isn’t being delegated to the CTO anymore as a tech problem. It’s now a business issue, a leadership issue, a growth imperative. It is a company imperative at all levels. CEOs aren’t asking why AI matters—they’re asking:‍

• ‍Where exactly should we apply it first? What use cases?
• How do we do this without creating chaos or customer risk?
• How will this give us a real competitive advantage?
• Can AI do this better than our staff? (cue: Shopify CEO memo)

Strategic design leaders can answer these questions by way of integrating both business and design practices into the mix. Design executive Kaaren Hanson shares that “the strategic role of design leadership is to bring critical thinking, customer insight, and creative foresight into every major business decision.”

This is where strategic design leaders retain evergreen value to ensure companies are clear about how they use AI to create or defend competitive moats. Neither thinking or doing alone is enough in the AI era. Our practice will need to harnesses the power of AI to accelerate our ability to what Janaki Kumar calls for designers and researchers to do better on their ability to "move the plot forward." Your work should actually enhance the business competitiveness, not just do what AI can do: the task.

How design leaders can respond

Whether you're a design leader in a specific business unit, or a global Chief Design Officer, the design job is getting bigger as more production-level tasks get automated, and more emphasis is placed on strategic design, digital transformation, and business model innovation.

We need to bring forward not just good ideas, but business-aligned propositions.

• Use cases backed by real customer needs
• Clarity on jobs to be done
• Clear rationale for competitive value
• Assessing opportunity and operational requirements  

Experience strategies that integrative yet actionable—ones that are able to improve or reimagine business models, unlock new revenue streams, accelerate operational readiness, and carve out defensible moats. Effective design leaders will ensure their propositions aren't divorced from operational realities.

Category-improving AI that enhances existing business practices

In the first area, it focuses on existing problems to solve and improve. This is the most obvious area of focus for companies today. We're witnessing how companies of all types have set early visions around service and efficiency to transform the customer experiences and enterprise capabilities with AI:

• ‍Wells Fargo's AI assistant crossed 245 million interactions in 2024 alone with no human handoffs of sensitive customer data exposed to its LLMs using a privacy-first pipeline. This showcases the customer-centric and technical leadership required to develop commercially viable AI.
• ‍J.P. Morgan's Contract Intelligence (COIN) platform automated the document review process for credit agreements where AI reduced the manual workload from 360,000 hours to mere seconds. AI also improved payment validation and fraud detection, leading to a reduction in rejection rates by 15-20%, showcasing the productivity savings and customer value of AI.
• Xcel Energy leveraged AI to automate 70,000 hours of manual work in one year, unlocking $15 million in potential savings and advancing its clean energy goals. By aligning digital tools with operator needs, the company not only freed up employees for higher-value work but also boosted usability scores from 37 (“Awful”) to 82 (“Excellent”), showcasing the power of combining user-centricity and AI to drive business value.

While efficiency, cost-savings, and productivity remain the early AI use cases—focused on optimizing existing business models—the most exciting frontier is still ahead: using AI to spark entirely new ones. That’s where strategic design leaders have a key role to play.

Category-defining AI

‍As AI advances in capability, companies must look beyond obvious applications toward more creative, human-centered opportunities—surfaced through research, insight, and strategic design. Apple, Amazon, Google, Uber, Facebook, and Netflix reshaped how we work, live, and connect in the cloud, mobile, and social eras. The AI era will be no different. This time, AI-native players like OpenAI are creating both existential risks and new possibilities for incumbents.

Consider the example of Waymo, born 15 years ago as the “Google Self-Driving Car Project.” While others like Uber, Apple, and GM’s Cruise pulled back from the autonomous vehicle race, Waymo stayed the course. It now offers fully driverless rideshare services in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles—facilitating over 50,000 paid rides each week, and even making Uber Eats deliveries in Phoenix. Source: David Meyer, Fortune.‍

Waymo’s journey and the rise of AI chatbots offer two distinct narratives about how AI creates value. Chatbots and agents enhance existing processes—improving customer service, reducing response times, and improving operational efficiency. They’re powerful tools for optimization, often delivering fast ROI with relatively modest investments.

Waymo represents a full-scale transformation of a business model. It doesn’t just improve transportation—it redefines it. By building an autonomous ride-hailing service from the ground up, Waymo has turned a traditionally labor-intensive, low-margin industry into a scalable software platform and a long-term competitive advantage. But risks with AI remain, including trust and safety, AI advancements, regulatory oversight and consumer preferences.

Design leaders can help businesses confront existential threats—not just by identifying them, but by shaping bold propositions for transformation.

These propositions demand more than design thinking. They require a multidisciplinary view of how to move the business forward—combining insight, technology, operations, and brand into integrated strategies. When done well, they don’t just solve problems—they create new sources of advantage, unlock growth across categories, and safeguard the company’s long-term relevance.

The distinction is important: one is about incremental improvement; the other is about category disruption. Both require different levels of leadership, investment, and risk tolerance—but each, when thoughtfully designed, delivers value to both the business and its customers at higher or lower magnitudes of competitive advantage.

For design executives, Waymo’s journey illustrates a story around not just automating existing processes but about envisioning and creating new value propositions that were previously unattainable. As AI continues to mature, the opportunity lies in leveraging it to pioneer innovative business models that meet evolving customer needs and expectations.

Design executive perspectives

Throughout the past Q1 2025, we convened members of Design Executive Council to discuss the posture and practices that design leaders need to take on to be relevant in the AI era. We’ve taken some of those quotes to help give texture to our points.

In order for companies to companies to drive meaningful adoption of their AI-driven offerings, design leaders have a distinct role to play to help drive strategic clarity and accelerate operational readiness.

Jeff Gelfuso, Chief Design Officer at Qualtrics, said it plainly: “If we don’t take the role of guiding AI strategy, investments and implementation, someone else will. And then it won’t be human-centered. It won’t be focused on elevating human experiences.”

Design executives, equipped with the power of customer and human insight can help transform business opportunities into a vision for the customer experience and enterprise.

Luke Stevenson, SVP Design at CBS, offered a powerful framing from the field: “Every conversation is about trying to work out what the world looks like in five years, and we are leveraging design's strengths to show that future state and be able to tell what must happen by working backwards”

This kind of energy is what it means to go on the offensive, rather than what design executive Brian Rice calls "design as policing." How might we bring what design executive Kaaren Hanson calls "contributions that are accretive to the organization?" We need to be leading that conversation with forward-enabling contributions as opposed to putting our police hats on and being the naysayer calling what you can't do versus what you could do.

It's an important posture shift that opens more doors to co-authoring business strategies. This is a moment that asks us to be more than craftspeople. It asks us to be leaders who drive businesses forward by knowing how to best serve the customer and win the market.

Design can be one powerful lens through which companies anticipate change—and the discipline that ensures AI solutions are not just technically sound, but behaviorally wise, emotionally intelligent, and competitively sharp. It must be more than just another chat bot, but an ambitious and differentiated vision of how the company will uplift the lives of customers by offering category-transforming approach to the experience.

It comes back to problem solving, but with a strategic approach

A 2024 RAND Corporation study on AI project success and failure identified five root causes of failure—chief among them: industry stakeholders often misunderstand or miscommunicate the core problem that AI is intended to solve.

Cindy Chastain, former SVP Customer Experience and Design at Mastercard, captured this so well: “People didn’t understand what a good use case was, what problem they were solving. It was purely technology-led… the opportunity is how do you help bring a human-centered perspective on the applications of Gen AI.”

This is where design shines: framing the right problems. Understanding the hidden friction. Translating what’s desirable for customers into what’s viable and profitable for the business.

Janaki Kumar, Chief Design Officer at JPMorgan, put it best: “Companies are looking at how they can make existing business models faster, better and cheaper, while also exploring new business models. The beauty of human-centered design principles for AI is they can be relevant and applicable to both focuses.”

Strategic design leadership goes far beyond usability. It’s not just about improving interfaces—it’s about shaping direction. Today, it’s about guiding companies toward new opportunities, not simply shielding them from risk.

This is the shift: from enhancing products and services to becoming the source engine of customer-valued innovation. Design leaders aren’t just improving what exists—they’re imagining what’s next, and aligning it with what matters most to customers and the business.

Kurt Walecki, former SVP Design at Intuit shared that: "AI is too often about efficiencies. We must expand beyond that and design executives can be stewards of AI customer metrics like retention, product-market fit, daily and monthly active usage, and more. This needs to be talked about more about how we create customer-valued AI products that keep them coming back because we are effectively solving problems."

Changing design paradigms with AI

AI is ushering in entirely new design paradigms—introducing agents that will not only transform customer experiences, but also reshape enterprise workflows. Leaders can no longer think in isolated use cases. What’s required now is systems thinking: an integrated view of how AI operates across the business.

Jennifer Darmour, VP Health Design at Oracle puts it, “You’re not just designing a product anymore; you’re shaping a new character or actor that collaborates with the user and other agents.” This shift challenges business, technology, and design leaders to think holistically about how AI becomes a collaborative force in shaping experiences, not just a functional tool.

AI is also unlocking new creative pathways for how we connect with—and serve—users. It’s not just changing what we design, but how we relate to the people we’re designing for. GenAI opens space for more humane technology by design.

Christina Vallery, Chief Design Officer at Cigna Group shared: "I believe that experience design will take a new form, that it will be centered around listening rather than presenting, and designing as asked rather than as an authority. This gives new meaning to the idea of service design, it releases us from the design patterns that we have come to mechanically deliver. It returns us to our creative imaginations."

This shift challenges business, technology, and design leaders to reimagine AI not as a tool, but as new collaborative presence within dynamic ecosystems of people, data, and decision-making. Taken together with the reflections from the design executives above, one thing is clear: the job of impactful design is evolving fast.

Closing the gap between AI ambition and reality

For companies to accelerate from buildout to adoption more rapidly, strategic clarity helps guide more effective transformation, data, governance, and operational changes, reducing the chaos that these efforts can often bring to organizations.

Suzanne Pellican, VP UX at Google notes: “The imagination of what AI technology can actually do right now far outpaces reality. Some of the most basic elements of great experiences are being assumed.”

The ambition is real — but the plumbing is outdated. Across industries, design leaders are being asked to integrate AI into workflows, customer experiences, and product roadmaps… before the foundational tech stack is even AI-compatible.

This isn’t just a technical lag. It’s a leadership blind spot.

Julie Mathers, VP UX at Paylocity shared how “executives expect us to be AI-ready, but we’re still modernizing infrastructure.”

AI isn’t a layer you sprinkle on top. It requires coordinated investment in data accessibility, API infrastructure, and governance frameworks — all of which fall outside most design teams’ remit, but directly affect their ability to deliver.

This provides design leadership a timely moment to rise up as a strategic force: advance the business's competitive position by elevating strategic clarity of the opportunity while guiding the short and long-term operational readiness to deliver.

The challenge now is to navigate this tension with clarity:‍

• Where can AI add immediate value within current infrastructure constraints?
• Where must design push for sequencing — getting the order of operations right?
• And how do we reframe infrastructure work not as a backend slog, but as a prerequisite for intelligent, human-centered systems?

Design can’t solve all infrastructure gaps — but it can expose misalignments and reset expectations before strategy outpaces capability

Design leadership positioning must move from:

• Product enhancement to vision-setting
• Usability improvements to proposition creation
• Designing with tools to designing through AI
• Design leadership to design-informed business leadership
  

And design leaders need to confront three truths: ‍

1. Ambition without clarity is noise
2. Speed without sequence is chaos
3. Infrastructure must be reframed as a design problem
   

In the AI buildout phase, progress isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing the right things, in the right order, with the right lens. That’s the work of strategic design leadership now.

Takeaways:

1. GenAI is a paradigm-shift in technology, bringing new dynamics to competition. Companies should deeply diagnose their competitive risks and opportunities, and radically inquire about the state of the business. Like the paradigms preceding it: mobile, social, clouding. GenAI is bringing a shift in competition and pacing. GenAI specifically is exponentially accelerating the pace of innovation faster than its predecessor. The conditions for success have evolved, and design leaders should not assume the same playbook of the past. GenAI is redefining the way we create value.
2. Design leaders must now drive the where and how of GenAI deployment. The why is no longer in question—CEOs and Boards are aligned on AI’s strategic importance. What’s missing is clarity on how to apply it meaningfully. This is where design leadership becomes indispensable. To lead effectively, design executives must partner more closely than ever with cross-functional leaders to shape holistic propositions—not just ideas, but commercially viable strategies. That means identifying real customer problems, validating market opportunities, and articulating use cases where GenAI delivers measurable business value. One of the principal risks GenAI poses to large public companies lies in cybersecurity, trust and AI quality. From banks to healthcare, design leaders should be building deeper partnerships with their data, risk and policy teams. Data literacy will be fundamental to design leadership success in this era.
3. Effective design leadership influence depends on being that clarifier: not only surfacing insights, but translating them into a clear and inspiring vision for the future—one that executives can believe in and invest behind. This vision must do more than improve today’s experience. It must articulate how the company can leapfrog competitors, unlock new growth, or build defensible positions in emerging categories. Design leaders will need to learn how to go beyond user delight and satisfaction, but category transformation. This also means aligning vision with operational transformation and readiness to act on the opportunity.
4. Carve out time and build the capacity to engage in strategic work with senior executives. Without a strong bench to manage operational demands, many design leaders find themselves stuck in execution—unable to step into the high-stakes conversations that shape company direction. As one CDO put it, “The trap is not having enough capacity—so you stay in the weeds, and miss the rooms where strategy happens.” In the GenAI era, where ambiguity is high and the stakes even higher, CEOs are looking for leaders who can bring clarity, conviction, and a forward-looking vision. The opportunity to influence that vision is here—but only for those prepared to show up as strategic partners.‍
5. The research companies need today isn’t just usability testing—it’s frontier research, foresight, and futures. The kind that uncovers paradigm-shifting insights, reframes market opportunities, and gives executives the confidence to invest in what’s next. Design leaders must meet this moment by putting a bold stake in the ground—articulating where the company should go and why. Yes, mistakes will happen. But stagnation is a far greater risk. In a world where speed and clarity are competitive advantages, design leaders must be seen as those who move the business forward—not as cautious observers, but as conviction-led partners in progress.

Don’t get left behind. CEOs are already worried their organizations are moving too slowly. The time to lead—with clarity, urgency, and strategic foresight—is now.

Design is growing up, and it will require us to show up differently

To end our first briefing, I'll leave you with a final reflection.

With the collective centuries of experience in our Council, we've noticed an exciting emergence and growth of strategic design leaders. A recognition that to serve at the highest levels requires a different energy in the game. Design is growing and maturing, especially from a leadership perspective. And many of these transformations have been overlooked by popular discourse. This is why I believe our work is so important, we can see things far before they become popular, or visible. The takeaways we shared above reflect on the individual opportunity leaders have to make a difference in business, and continue to show up with influence.

Big businesses have quietly continued to hire, retain and promote design leaders who continue to serve in ways that marry both customer, business, and market perspectives for success, and do so in a way that garners trust from C-Suites, CEOs and Boards. Design leaders need to do better on the last part. Building deep trust to our business partners by showing up not as a hero or savior, but as a business partner for success, one that brings forth strong propositions and momentum that advances the business forward.

Boeing, Capital One, Cigna, Delta Airlines, Google, JPMorgan, Oracle, SAP, Target, and Wells Fargo—are just a handful of Fortune 1000 companies across sectors that have hired, promoted or retained senior design executives at a strategic level to make things work at the scale and speed business now demands, while breathing beauty and human-centricity into how the business improves people's lives. The AI era has shown us that big businesses are investing in strategic design leadership more than ever, but in a way that demands far greater business leadership than of the past.

They’re not asking for a seat. They’re helping contribute to the table by showing up as leaders, not just designers. I’ve seen it firsthand through my work leading the Design Executive Council and why I'm so proud to share this briefing with you.

So to leave with you with a mantra that I see embodied from every design executives that has made it to the top job:

Leader first. Designer second.

Craft still matters. It always will. But today’s edge lies in how well you lead, align and enhance business imperatives. We are hired to solve business problems. And we make the world a better place when we can help businesses succeed while enriching people's lives. We must create a win-win. This is design's big bright future, if we can learn how to lead first, and design second.

Consider subscribing and support our mission to advance strategic design leadership. Our next briefing comes out May, including insightful articles along the way. Join us on this exciting mission.

For the love of design,

Gordon Ching
Founder & CEO, Design Executive Council

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