How Design Work Is Evolving
As AI-powered workflows and agent-mediated interactions become more common, design increasingly shapes system behavior and orchestration. This shift is expanding where and how designers create impact.
2026 just started and it’s hitting hard already. Agent adoption is accelerating. Moltbot (Clawdbot) and Claude Cowork indicate a clear interest from people seeking more and more hands-off workflows. It means the conventional control layers are changing:
Buttons → Natural language
Shipping/Payment details → Agentic checkout
Workflows execution → Outcomes orchestration
Just look at the trajectory for yourself. First, we had a browser and our computers/mobile devices to perform work, then LLM agents became our interfaces for completing everything the browser was allowing, now extensions such as Moltbot turn any messaging app (WhatsApp, Telegram) into the main interface.
Does this mean mobile apps and web apps will die? No. There are still plenty of jobs that require exceptional control, human trust, and stay heavily regulated: high-stakes final decisions and high-ticket commerce, finance, healthcare, etc.
However…
This is the time when consumer preference defines a new software category, and design ICs and leaders better be in the room where it shapes now.
So where does design live when agents become a new interface?
Perhaps the input/composer UI itself, or interaction design of inputting/sending a message, loader, “Thinking…”, or response streaming animation?
Not quite. Don’t get me wrong - craft is important, but many designers don’t understand that the visual layer is no longer where the hardest design problems live. It increasingly lives in behavior, orchestration, and system-level decisions.
As of now, I have unique and rare experience shaping agentic behaviors and working on a frontier AI model, partnering closely with business and ML engineers. And I’m telling you this experience is what any (D)esigner (PD, UX, UI, IxD, CD) can benefit from having in their career. Designers who understand where design work is moving will have disproportionate leverage.
The brand new values designers bring to the table
We are still valuable for crafting bespoke user experiences. In the era of AI slop, craft will distinguish products people love from products people tried once. Interaction design, unique branding and identity, interfaces that are adaptive to people’s needs. Yes, the competition will become more aggressive, and our justification for a great user experience has to harden, but craft is no longer enough.
Our unique value is extreme (and sometimes obsessed) empathy towards users and their success especially enforcing security, bad experience, and edge case guardrails.
What happens when:
User shares secret keys or credentials
User insists on executing unsafe workflows
Agent hallucinates or provides an insufficient response
These and many other use cases are where designers can step in and help and stakeholders who can leverage designers’ passion towards quality of agentic outcomes will benefit from this function the most.
Are you just designing, designing with AI, or designing for AI?
Currently there are 3 types of designers on the market: those who just design using conventional tools, those who prototype using AI-assistants in IDEs, and those who design for AI.
To each their own, but I believe being the first type only is extremely dangerous in 2026. I have my thoughts on vibe-coding (spoiler alert: it’s not safe to solely focus on only that either) and I will share it in my next articles, but that’s not the point.
The point is designers should stop thinking that their job ends when Figma is behind hand-off or a prototype is shared.
Please, start being curious about:
How models work
How to make agent outcomes better
How to prevent agents from failing and how to help them recover
How to personalize agents so they reflect a company’s values and match consumers’ tone of voice
Here’s some materials to explore:
UX for AI by Greg Nudelman
Designing Human-Centric AI Experiences by Akshay Kpre
Human + Machine by Paul Daugherty & H. James Wilson
Untill next time…