New work, new words: A glossary for AI
This video is featured in the AI Conference playlist.
Summary
Key Insights
-
•
Paul coins 'agentrification' to describe AI-driven shifts merging agencies and product companies.
-
•
AI commoditizes routine design and engineering tasks, pushing designers from visual creation to descriptive roles.
-
•
New roles like 'solution engineers' arise, blending product, design, and engineering responsibilities empowered by AI.
-
•
Rapid shipping enabled by AI often leads to shallow, unused features, raising questions about true user value.
-
•
The disappearance of traditional processes causes chaos and frustration; friction in workflows has meaningful value.
-
•
AI-generated lengthy PRDs often lack clarity, forcing teams to use AI tools again just to distill them.
-
•
Disposable prototypes or 'promptotypes' proliferate, causing collaboration breakdown and leadership challenges.
-
•
Portfolios risk becoming generic as designers over-rely on AI-generated work, losing human identity and depth.
-
•
Engineers are facing devaluation similar to what designers experienced historically, requiring new empathy dynamics.
-
•
Paul sees AI's greatest gift as enabling access to complex deterministic systems and reviving love for low-level computing.
Notable Quotes
"I didn’t want to be an AI guy. That was never my goal."
"Are we an agency that is also kind of a product? Is the agency a product? The product an agency? We’re an agenuct? No, pragency."
"Designers are being told to be less and less visual; your job involves more product discussion—you’re going from designer to describer."
"We’re shipping all the time and shipping really big things often without really caring if anybody uses it."
"We get these 75-page PRDs created by enthusiastic people, not PMs, and they’re unreadable. We call that fake holder input."
"Everything is disposable now; we’re drowning in prototypes and reviewmiliation—so much work shows up overnight."
"Design portfolios are filled with slop when people lean too much on AI; you lose the human effort that makes design meaningful."
"Engineers have never before been told they aren’t the most valuable people—this is new, so have empathy for them."
"The great gift of AI is not magic but giving access to parts of the computer that used to take weeks or months to fiddle with."
"Process and discipline got thrown out the window, but we really need new processes that incorporate these new AI tools."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Don Norman was named the top accomplished woman in UX by AI, even though Don is a man."
Dan SafferWhy AI projects fail (and what we can do about it)
May 14, 2025
"If you say you won’t use AI, that’s even more reason to use it so you can debate the ethics intelligently."
Tom Armitage Carla Diana Kanene Ayo HolderDay 2 Panel: Looking ahead: Designing with AI in 2026
June 11, 2025
"Nearly half of adults in the UK read at a literacy level that makes understanding complex documents very challenging."
Phil HeskethDesigning Accessible Research Workflows
September 29, 2021
"In some ways the signal of insight maturity is accepting that research needs more than two days and sometimes months to deliver."
Jemma Ahmed Chris GeisonBridge Building across Research Disciplines
August 26, 2021
"After this program, we saw a shift from only 15% strategic research to 56%."
Marjorie Stainback Kelsey KingmanTransforming Strategic Research Capacity through Democratization
October 24, 2019
"Use these tools to define who you are going to hire next and what gaps those hires need to fill."
Holly ColeUnderstanding Experiences: When you have to do more than work
November 8, 2018
"I see designers fall back on being the defender of the user like a union boss, but that’s not your only responsibility."
Gretchen AndersonScaling the Human Center
June 8, 2017
"If someone doesn’t have that direct lived experience, it’s not just enough to go to the closest thing you can find."
Samuel MartinCo-Design vs Faux-Design: Navigating the Complexities of Sharing Power in Co-Design
March 27, 2026
"Scale is social work because it’s about creating relationships and reducing friction."
Jacqui FreyScale is Social Work
March 19, 2020
