Explore the Data

“As much as I said that I wasn't adopting AI, I think I was doing it more than I thought I was doing it.”

“I thought it was they asked me to do too much and I kept saying as much. ... I just delivered that for 25 to 30 tasks that I did.”

“I hate the hallucinations because it seems like there's no excuse for a lot of them, but it happens anyway.”

“I had to use AI to prove to people that what I said was on point.”

“I took the survey question by question went into Claude and asked Claude to critique and Claude doesn't know and Claude doesn't have any horses in the race.”

“It's a personal policy with me because I just believe in being transparent. ... I think it's plagiaristic if you don't.”

“We serve as coaches. We serve as supervisors. We evaluate the agentic risk. That's the expert's job.”

“I will never 100% trust AI ever because I don't think it will earn that. It's hard. I say it's an oxymoron.”

“I think the thing I'm getting better at is responding to terrible dysfunctional expectations of stakeholders because I can do things faster.”

“I will never let that dumbing down of self that everybody says the risk of AI is. I'll never let that happen because of the way that I maintain myself.”

“I talked to a person a week ago who was let go because of their job, because of AI, only to be rehired because they found out that they were wrong to let the people go because they found out AI couldn't do all the things.”

“I talked to a person a week ago who was let go because of their job, because of AI, only to be rehired because they found out that they were wrong to let the people go because they found out AI couldn't do all the things.”

“I would copy that and paste it into chat GPT and say, "What does this mean in English?" basically and it would kind of dumb it down for me so I could understand better.”

“The biggest disappointment would be like when it's I'll say confidently wrong. Like it thinks that it's right and then it starts telling you to do things or that these things are facts.”

“I would say that it has to do with how important what you're asking it is. So I think it's a great first step.”

“It helps bridge the gap between organizations and people... it helps me not feel like I get railroaded by insurance claims and stuff as easily.”

“I haven't completely offloaded any tasks for it. I pretty much just use it to augment what I do.”

“Use it as a learning tool and not a do it for me tool. If I can tell that you've clearly just thrown it in there and said, "Do this for me," then you kind of lose that personal credibility in my eyes.”

“My ability to spell certain things has kind of went down because I'm just so used to, oh, okay, it sees what I'm trying to do and it fixes it for me.”

“I was kind of looking at maybe going back to school to learn an extra skill that maybe is more human centric because that human touch I think is going to be more of what keeps people employed.”

“Google AI Studio has been my favorite tool to use. That's my primary tool, but it's all side of desk. I literally when this came out, they didn't even roll it out to everybody... So, I would sit here and then my actual AI computer was on my left.”

“We had two weeks we lost all the vendors like all of them like 45% reduction but just in the design team. So we were still supporting 14 delivery pods and we're like oh crap how are we going to keep the ship right?”

“Well, that's where it gets tricky because the organization bought an AI company and that company is growing rapidly, but we don't have clear line of sight to what everything they're doing. So, there's a lot of back office things they have done...And then there's just been a huge push to build agents. We just don't have line of sight of where that's happening. It's scary because we haven't hired any design for the last two years other than the last the AVP we just got, but that AI company within us has grown to 130 people. So, they're almost double bigger than our design team...”

“There's no royalty model. We know that a lot of the models were trained on other people's intellectual property... there's no compensation for it.”

“I started taking those newsletters and corporate communications and feeding them into Copilot and then had Copilot build me how to write like this executive. What are their key points? How do they say their things?”

“My biggest fear is that we're not replacing the apprentice level people like and they still need a fundamental of whatever their craft is without AI... who's going to watch the watchers who will know that something is wrong because they never did it.”

“Am I inadvertently working myself out of a job? And then if that's the case, then what am I going to make that I can commoditize to stay afloat.”

“I'm on one week sprint cycles here at [organization] on my product, which makes you want to really pant. So I have to use AI to at least help me get drafts or clean up a report.”

“They are throwing every single tool our way. And I feel bad for our designers because they have even more. Like for example Linear and then there's Cursor and then we have all the Figma Make.”

“We already went from Rive mania to Figma Make mania and now we're on like Cursor mania. It seems like there is always a new tool and you have to almost use all of them to feel comfortable.”

“I think they want us to be like down 10 hours of work a week with these tools by the end of the year.”

“My designers are not getting something as thorough as this. We've done little mini pilot sessions before we even get to the training sessions as a group. So we're super lucky because my designers are literally just being told by their manager like, "Here's Figma. Go play with it.”

“We had were doing plenty of studies where it's not actually reading all seven. It might have only referenced five. So that's been an issue for us is trusting to be like, okay, did it actually analyze all the calls?”

“Right off the bat, the first time I used this like a month ago, it hallucinated a whole quote.”

“She can spin anything to it being okay and that we don't have to improve it. So that's really hard for me because I know she's coming in here and saying like what are the wins and then if she doesn't find win she's going to like twist it and then I'm like wait did you check that? And she's like I don't have time to check it.”

“They're saying, "Oh, we want 50% of code to be written by AI." And I have some of my locally located developers who are like, I already spend so much time cleaning up this low-quality code from our overseas colleagues and now I have even crappier code in my AI that they have to review and they're like, it just would have been faster.”

“So my accessibility and content designers are a little concerned that as accessibility builds this really cool thing in Cursor to remind everybody to be accessible that they've trained this agent to do they're like okay well are they still going to have me in three years or will there just be less of us?”

“People are even arguing that AI moderated researchers are better than human researchers, which I'm like, I don't know about that.”

“A lot of them now are making them look really cool and have vibe coding but I don't think they ever go back in and add anything just whatever they prompted and told our customers and there's parts where it says supposed to have secondary research and customer research and it's just making up pain points in there and so everything looks put together and there's a lot of words on a page but nobody's still going in for that second layer.”

“Everybody's like, 'Looks cool.' And then I'm like, 'No, but read it.' Does any of this [make sense]?”

“If everybody was on a scale of who it is, research is more on I'm going to do my second pass. We're probably on the highest end and then product managers are way over here.”

“I live in [midwest US city] and there is a data center getting put in [city], which is where [organization] headquarters is, and there's a data center being put in [neighboring city], which is technically the city I live in. And so we're just seeing all these horror stories of people running out of water and we know they're coming for the Midwest because of our water and it makes us worried that it's all some big dumb bubble.”

“My husband works our electrical company as a lineman. So he already sees how stressed out the grid is from people just flicking on their air conditioning in the summer. And a lot of these they just get a free pass at a lot of our utilities whether it be water and power without building their own substation because that would cost way too much money.”

“Our friend who does the concrete for the [nearby city] data center that there was a big push to get that closed, but there's just not very many laws to protect the rights of what people want. They're already building it in a way that they're like, 'Well, we can turn this into a warehouse or maybe this would just be an Amazon warehouse afterwards.' So they're already kind of predicting like the people that are building it are already like this bubble might pop.”

“My bonus, my performance, is attached to how much I use AI at work. So I have to [use it]... if I don't I might not get my bonus. So at first before I was really figuring out how to do it in my workflow. I was just asking it for my grocery list and other dumb stuff and I felt bad because everybody tells you one search is dumping out a water bottle and I'm like oh no I have to do so many searches a day or else I don't get my bonus.”

“I guess I don't know if miserable failure is accurate but not far from that. Essentially figured out that what we were doing wasn't working and that it wasn't getting us where we wanted to be and the cost benefit was just not even close to being there.”

“The way I describe it is that for a research activity that would take a researcher alone five days to complete, if you look at it with AI alone, it might take a day, but in order to do a good job of it, the necessary human AI interaction, you might get closer to three days.”

“So, I think, well, I guess disappointment is maybe the right word. So, it was kind of discovering that, maybe not unexpectedly, I guess the bar was pretty low, but discovering that Dovetail still needed a lot of babysitting to get a lot of results. We had to go in and we realized that the transcripts had a lot of misattributions. I mean there were just a lot of things that need to be cleaned up to make it useful beforehand. That allowing Dovetail to kind of create its own tags and apply those was not sufficient. We still needed to do the diligence to go in and apply our own tags to make it more meaningful and real world context.”

“not just relying on the transcripts alone, but introducing moderator notes to the analysis as well to help get that real world and actual findings.”

“I think I've kind of been using GPT for working through kind of major life events. So like considering purchasing a house for example, kind of working through that and doing tradeoffs and running scenarios and what to consider, and thinking of it as sort of a, I don't want to say co-pilot but the thing is it's kind of a sounding board that's very knowledgeable about a whole lot of topics. Particularly in a context where it involves major life decisions you don't trust it”

“completely, but you're able to cover a whole lot of ground, cover a whole lot of topics, get a lot of insights and things that you hadn't really considered brought into the conversation.”

“that there were many conversations where we were working on projects together,”

“most internal things, and that people would contribute their own thoughts but it was really AI assisted thinking going into it and we didn't really think about it, we didn't set any policies about that or any guidelines around discussions. I think people just are kind of freely admitting is like the AI and I put this together and our thinking is more, I think it's almost along the lines of making an attribution with a quote that you use and it's not completely my own thinking but it doesn't diminish the quality of it just because of that.”

“I think for the most part those came from say communications from on high. Kind of the organizational level communications that would go out that you could tell there's no thought other than a general direction of I want to communicate this to a whole lot of people in this particular organization and do it. And I think the takeaway I get from that is just like okay, I think it kind of diminishes the impact of the message going forward, is like if it becomes apparent that there is very little of your own thought other than a general direction then it's just, can't really ignore it necessarily but it doesn't have the same impact.”

“We had product that was making recommendations and we're kind of proving on the results that were presented by the AI to the participants in testing and that was one thing that just came out as huge, that without some insight into where the AI was coming up with that output, and having some indication like just calling out these are the preferences or I'm getting it from our discussion about X Y and Z, without that, particularly in an enterprise context when decisions can be costly and have risk associated with them,”

“it was a clear message from the participants that there's no way that they would rely on those outputs without some insight into where they were coming from.”

“I don't know if you recall, there's an old George Carlin routine that, you'd be talking with someone that sounds like they really know what they're talking about for a while and you're like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, go on." And then there's this, he's full of b.s., I think I've encountered that with AI a few times.”

“Yeah, I mean I think in some cases if I'm not too far down a path I can just go back and kind of confirm but then also kind of reset the chat saying like it's getting off topic, I want to focus more on X Y and Z and I'd like to have it based on these particular types of resources and just kind of pull it pull it back in focus a little.”

“I've been looking out for, I guess, the effect that people discuss about how it kind of detracts from your own thinking or your own creativity to rely on AI to produce outcomes. And I don't think that's happened to me. And I think if it indeed has not happened, I think it may have something to do with how I see the AI interactions.”

“It's not sort of the replacement, but as an assistant, kind of a sounding board, if you will.”

“I mean there's already great concerns about replacement. And I think the people who are actually hands-on with the work kind of understand that it's not there at least not yet to do kind of full replacement.”

“Whether or not leadership understands that I don't know. So I suspect what's going to happen is there's going to be a dramatic overreaction to the introduction of AI. It's going to make a lot of changes to organizations that probably shouldn't occur. And at some point, we'll probably have a massive overcorrection.”

“I don't know if I actually put a finger on the fact that what I was using is AI, but I know that it has been underneath a lot of services and things that I used probably before I moved into an AI-forward area of my career.”

“It's grossly inaccurate, but I think that kind of points to the human-in-the-loop element: it only gets smarter if whoever's using that system goes back and double checks and says, "Oh, no, it's not that, it's this.”

“they have made Copilot available to everybody. I have thoughts on that. I hate Copilot, but our legal team is using it to streamline writing certain kinds of documentation that's repetitive, of course with gross human oversight.”

“And because we don't want people just translating things who don't understand the language, it also assigns a confidence rating. And our set confidence is if it's a 95% or above confidence rating you can roll with it.”

“If it's below that it needs some human oversight, and if it's below a certain level, like once we hit like 70%, it's something that we would want to send to our translation partner.”

“It works for a little while. It may work beautifully for a hundred inquiries using that prompt, but eventually it starts to drift. And I know that I've had this frustration factor on both my personal use as well as sometimes my use at work, particularly with, I've admitted I'm frustrated with Copilot. They get drifty and they get really drifty and you sit there and you're like, "It's not that hard. Why don't you just do your job? I told you what your job is." And one of the things that it's doing in the back end is it's trying to streamline me. Given it a complex set of edits, like, "Where can I cut corners?" And so I would say is kind of where the disappointment is, that it's hard to create a workflow that replicates every single time consistently without it being long and detailed, saying, "You may not move on until this happens." That's I think the big disappointment, that you don't have the, vibe coding is such a thing right now, but you don't have that kind of usage of AI.”

“I am an advocate of continuous human oversight. I saw a quote from IBM today and it was something to the effect of, a computer cannot be held accountable and therefore it should not make managerial decisions. That applies over a lot of different areas. I think, I'm sure you've read about the United Healthcare stuff where it was making accept/reject determinations that resulted in a massive lawsuit. I am a huge advocate for human in the loop.”

“Something that is a major pain point to me is that at a consumer level, we don't necessarily have any insight into how this works for us and how it's a necessary thing. It streamlines logistics. It streamlines fraud detection on down the line. We're not looking at that. We see all of the scam attempts of garbage AI scam attempts where it's just wash, rinse, repeat, and they're contacting a gajillion people to see who will bite. We see what it's doing as far as the bad parts of AI, especially with social media.”

“What they don't realize is that you kind of have to. It's already underneath so much that we rely very heavily on.”

“When I come back from Peru, I got a new job. And one of the things that I've noticed is that they always ask you, "What is your weakness?" And my weakness is definitely, I'm almost overly detail-oriented. That is a blessing and a curse because it means you can really get over-involved in the minutia and lose sight of everything that's out here. I find that when I'm controlling AI well and I'm using it to streamline my work or to help me think through a problem or to do affinity mapping, it's great at affinity mapping, the time for me to use it is when I'm over-involved in one little thread because what it'll do is broaden me out and give me 10 different threads that I might not be looking at.”

“I think it helps me zoom out and if I need to zoom back in, helps me zoom in. It has to be accurately prompted to do it. But I really think that that is probably where it benefits me the most: it helps me to see patterns and to see things that I might not otherwise because I'm very close to my work.”

“And that is the result of social media. I very firmly believe that it hasn't necessarily been a good thing for them. So what happens when we lose our ability to sit and gnaw on a problem or think creatively about something or think outside the box? What happens when we're only going to the AI for the solution? What does it do to human ingenuity? And that's a big concern of mine.”

“So I literally used, it was in my last year of my most recent grad program, I literally used AI to teach me how to do R. And I've used it to learn multiple software platforms at this point, specifically data analytics. Tableau was a big one. Because when I would start to encounter resistance and get to that point where I'm frustrated and I'm going to quit, I have something there where I can say, "Okay, this is the kind of visualization I am trying to make. This is where the data is porting in here and how it's set. And for some reason, I'm pulling up donuts. What is going on?" And it has that ability even from a screenshot to look and say, "Oh, well, you need to move this around." And I think something people need to remember is ask it why. Why do you need to do that?”

“It recently sent me down a rabbit hole because I was like, "Okay, what's the difference between Newtonian relativity and Einstein's relativity?" And it starts explaining it. And when I start hitting those barriers that have been there because I'm not a physicist, I can say, "Hey, explain this to me like I'm in eighth grade. Can you use an example? Give me a metaphor for what you're describing here." And the odd thing is coming away with the ability to explain this complex thing but also an interest in it.”

“But I also worry that with some of the streamlining that it does, does anybody need to really know how to do calculus anymore? You can make the AI do it. These are critical skills, though, and they're skills we should have. We should be able to do algebra. It's a pain. Use the AI if you've got it. But I know a lot of teachers who are expressing frustration because their kids aren't learning some of these foundational things that they need to know.”

“In a way, we've created an information environment where we need it. We need AI. And I really think that that's the biggest promise of it, is to stop using it as a potential replacement for humans and use it as a way for us to manage this infosphere that we've built ourselves.”

“So it's funny because I considered [using AI to help draft a book] personal and not work. I listed that as one of the personal uses of AI instead of work, because the book was self-published. So it was really a personal project of mine, but the book is about interviews, qualitative interviews for research.”

“I really don't trust a synthesis or analysis and synthesis done entirely by AI. But even with the overview, I think it misses a lot of important stuff that's between the lines. And by the way, it's not just that. I think it's part of the process for us as researchers to immerse ourselves in the data. If we skip that, we don't understand the data afterwards, and we are not retaining that important knowledge that is kind of layering in the back of your mind.”

“The problem is that that kind of analysis gives you tunnel vision. So you don't get the context in which that is said. You don't get if they said it before or after something else. Because the moment you code in a sequence, you follow the conversation, you follow the flow. There is some logic behind it.”

“I don't take what comes out of an AI at face value, ever. In general.”

“it was suggesting that I went to a specific place, I did a plan, I didn't check, and then that place was shut down that day and for a while for renovation. I said, "I wasted one day that I had in this location. Why didn't I think about checking?”

“I think I rely a lot on, when there are things about research, things that I know, I use myself as a benchmark and I say, "No, you're not saying the right thing." And then that worries me, though, because I'm thinking, "Okay, all the things that I don't know, which are many, and all the domains that I don't know... should I believe it or not?”

“it's generative, right? I mean, we should expect that it invents. But I think the majority of people don't think about that. I try to remind myself, it's generating stuff. So I try to reply, "Please stick to the real thing." And it even invented places to eat that don't exist,”

“even with a fake website. I went there and this restaurant doesn't exist.”

“the trainee was definitely not using AI at all. And I asked, "Hey, are you using any?" And she went totally on the defensive, like,”

“Why are you asking this? No, I'm not." And I'm like, "That's fine. I just want to know. I want to know how you're using it and can we talk about it?" And she said,”

“No, absolutely not. I'm intentionally not using it because I'm learning." And I said, "Okay, good call. I agree with you. Since you're trying to learn, maybe you can use it afterwards as a benchmark. The first thing, the first draft of the moderation guide, the first screening, is only you with your thoughts, because you're learning the craft.”

“I've noticed that some things were definitely AI generated. So I just asked myself, "How do I ask this without sounding judgmental?" Which was... I didn't want it to be like, "Hey, are you using AI?" in a judgmental way. It's like, "Hey, can we talk about this? How are you using AI? Which tools are you using?”

“And I feel we shouldn't be ashamed of talking about [disclosing AI use]. And especially in a power dynamic where there's different seniority, I think we should be completely transparent about what the expectations are.”

“One is it makes me lazy. So I need to intentionally say, "No, I'm going to keep thinking for myself." I need to, again, similar to the person that was learning, retain the critical thinking. Otherwise it gets lost because it's a muscle. So we need to keep practicing and using it. And this is one thing I'm really keen on passing to the more junior colleagues. It's like, you cannot skip that. Forget about that, because otherwise you will be a solo lead really soon and you cannot delegate that critical thinking and problem solving to the machine.”

“So I don't think it impacts the way I'm thinking. It's just helping me work with my thinking, or articulate what I'm thinking, or challenging what I'm thinking. So in that sense, it's not the thinking, it's probably the how I work that changes.”

“the biggest fear is the reverse of the coin that I was mentioning before: people stop thinking. Stop critical thinking. That's a huge risk at the population level, because then we would be unable to do anything, like understanding our lives, making decisions, electing our politicians and whatnot. So that's really a risk that I see, because this is really tapping into our innate laziness”

“I remember distinctly my grandmother telling me, "Well, this is true because I've heard it on the radio." And then my parents saying, "No, this is true because I've heard it on TV." Then, "This is true because I read it on the internet." And [this is] true, because AI told me. So unfortunately I think this is just massive and pervasive in ways that we don't really grasp as of now.”

“now everything is at the tip of your fingers, but I don't think you're valuing it as much because it's effortless, and you don't question it as much as we did in the past.”

“[Employer] is extremely concerned about cybersecurity. We own a third of the electric grid and we get I think millions of cyber attacks a day, literally. So we have ways to, I mean it's very, very locked down to the point that even if I go to a site that has AI, the word, in it, I can't go to it. So the tools I can use at work are limited. Also, if there are new tools, the problem is a lot of the software tools that have been used before, whether it's Miro or Figma or anything, all of a sudden that has an AI component and a lot of them are not approved for different reasons.”

“So I've also been on a pilot for a coding assistant, which was fun, but it ended up not meeting our security team's levels of what they're looking for. So we're looking for another one.”

“just really defining, getting narrower and narrower in focus of what I want AI to do, and that got me better results. And that's kind of a metaphor for how I interact with the different chatbots: start with a really good definition of what I'm looking for, give it some background, and I turn it into a conversation.”

“I'm used to trying things over and over and over again, and once I get it right, I don't have to worry about it anymore. It works. With AI, I'll try things over and over and again and I get it to work, then I try to use it again and I get something different, like complaints, "Oh, I can't access these files" that I just accessed before.”

“I was really, really looking forward to learning how to use [Kiro] more and more, and then they pulled the rug from under our feet, and so I started researching other tools, but as of now, I can't bring anything in.”

“We're not allowed to use Figma Make because of their licensing agreement. And there's other tools. We're not allowed to use Lovable. I mean, right now we're not allowed to use the Google tool, but I just went home one day and just experimented on my own computer. It's not in the [employer] environment.”

“it's like working with a partner because it gives me ideas that I couldn't really figure on my own, different insights, but of course I have to double check everything. So that's actually a good example of guardrails. Before, I used the same tool to create personas for users of a data cataloging tool that we're looking to buy. So I gave all the interviews to the AI and said, create these personas, and it created five great personas, but it wasn't based on the data, it was based on general knowledge.”

“I'm not a native English speaker. When I write, I make grammatical mistakes and I don't find the right words always, and I'm worried that either my point doesn't come across, which is a problem, or especially when you type, that I might just not look as smart as I think I am. Again, my vocabulary is not as rich as I would like it to be. So that helped me with communications.”

“if you just take things as they are and not try to refine them, yeah, I mean it's easy to create an interface that's essentially AI slop. Yeah, it looks beautiful and it follows some patterns, but it doesn't necessarily provide anything new and it might not relate to the end user. So it might follow all the rules but miss some key points that are hard to define.”

“I recently started signing my emails that I ran through Copilot at the end, "edited by AI." And again, there's no reason for me to do that. And I kind of do it because I think it's funny, but it's kind of like the "sent from my iPhone" or whatever. But I feel like, beyond [people having to] look for the em dashes, I think it's a good way to disclose it.”

“I don't see unwritten rules. I always disclose when I use AI, whether it's reporting the results of something or if I do create any kind of visuals.”

“I'm going to run it through AI first and see if it comes up with some starter ideas instead of me doing a whole exploration. And it came up with something that I thought was pretty neat, and I just rebuilt it in Illustrator and gave it more depth and just more human touch, if you will.”

“If I can't trust it, well, my first assumption is that I did not define the problem well enough, I think.”

“I think the hallucinations are not a bug. I think it's a feature.”

“You build a relationship with AI because you have to correct it. You have to pay attention. It's not like sending something to the printer and you get exactly what was on the screen. Then you start engaging with it. And how I talk about it as a partner, I mean, that's giving it a personality and that's understanding it has flaws and strengths, and I think that's the main takeaway for me from AI is that if you want to use the strengths, you have to accept the flaws and work with them.”

“that's not something that I can go in and type to Copilot, "Find me a molecule to replace." You have to use it as a tool that augments what you do.”

“Teach myself everything. The first thing I did with it was I had it generate a massive glossary of terms about AI and conversation design. I still have it. It's on my nonprofit page.”

“There is a section with a glossary in it and that glossary was from like day one with ChatGPT, because I realized I needed to learn more than just NLU NLP. So the first thing I did was just learn all that terminology. It was hard because a lot of that terminology, LLM, you know, like there's just so much terminology that sounds like other terms that you needed to learn. So it's almost like Game of Thrones, right? Like with Tyrion and Tyron, and like I really struggled with those books in the beginning because everybody's name sounded the same. And it was the same thing with AI terminology. Learning all that terminology was the first thing I did with it. It was hard. And then I would have it quiz me.”

“But really I'm about to start writing on "what's your plan B" because I'm so integrated with Claude and Claude products and Anthropic that I don't like it. I feel monopolized. So I am trying to come up with a backup plan for when Claude Code goes down, right? It happens all the time.”

“Price gouging. Yeah. And I'm a plan B kind of person. You know, it's just back up your backup, your backup because I'm just wired that way. And I think it's an important topic of conversation. Like I am really afraid AI is going to create this massive class divide and what happens when Claude is $500 a month or $800, you know, what's your plan B? So, what happens when it goes down? Do you stop working for the day? Like I see people so dependent on it that they're like, I don't know how to work without it anymore.”

“So every morning at 8 a.m. I have a planning brief with Claude and I have it saved as a project inside of Claude.”

“And it's in my calendar because I integrated Claude with my calendar. So, that's really helped because like I said, I have ADHD and Claude really helps me, is helping me stay on task better because I have 50 squirrel moments a day. That's why I have literally like 40 Claude projects. I love the projects.”

“But what the one thing it has cured for me is the way my brain works is I have like six streams of consciousness at all times. Like not voices, but you know.”

“No, no. It's true. But what it's done is be able to allow me to get all my ideas out of my head into a project. And that getting it out and knowing it's safe closes the loop in my brain where I can say, "All right, that project, it might not be done, but it's handled. It's in a place you can close the lid on it and visit it when you need to." And it's uncluttered my brain in a way that I really, because I don't take any medication or anything like that. I work out a lot. That's like my fix for a lot of my neurological oddities. So, that gift of being able to get [my thoughts] out, put it in a suitcase, know it's safe, and visit with it whenever I want to work on that.”

“And then I might, in my 8 a.m. briefing, I'll say, "All right, this is done. This is done. I want to work on this and this." And I know Claude's going to put time in the calendar, and it's already in a project. So, I'm like doubly organized. I'm organized in my calendar, my time, but also in my filing system, and it's all connected.”

“Well, first of all, I started teaching about hallucinations from early on, and you can literally say, "LLM, teach me how to avoid hallucinations." And there is plenty you can do to make sure what you're getting back is real, right? So there are steps you can take, but now my friends are building these things, these AI brains where they're stacking the LLMs on top of each other, pulling a confidence score. But also the hallucination gap is closing too. It's getting less and less. I tell people all the time, if it's a subject matter that is common like tech, right, and there's old long history with it, it's probably going to get that right. But if you ask it about like, you know, the Figma update from yesterday, it's going to get it wrong. So, there's a time piece to it.”

“There's a subject piece to it. There's a prompting piece to it. But you can have the AI, I tell people all the time, have the AI teach you about the AI.”

“I am very out and about my personal usage. I actually teach people. I have some stuff on my LinkedIn in the featured section. I have a couple carousel lessons about how to be a thought innovator and not a slop generator.”

“Yeah, and because it's really true. What's happening though is YouTube is struggling, LinkedIn is struggling because there's so much AI generated stuff. So when I do something that's 100% AI generated, I preface it, like this is 100%, like I'm actually doing something publicly and purposefully 100% AI generated to show people what that looks like.”

“So, what that usually is, is I will say, "Hey, Claude, I want to write a LinkedIn post on X subject. Interview me on the subject." And then take my answers, do not change them, and turn it into a LinkedIn post with this LinkedIn post-writing skill. And that way it's me, my words, they don't get changed, they just get arranged nicely.”

“And then it will tell me you missed this, this, and this. And I'm like, oh, now I need to go study those things, right? So, it's a win and a win and a win, like right after one after the other. I got a great post. I got to use my knowledge, my words, and then also see where my knowledge gaps are and have a place to go study.”

“I worry for people who don't understand it. There's a huge, the majority is like, "I'm afraid of AI," or you know, Gen Z is absolutely opposed to it. And I think about, you know, there's also like a gender gap apparently, they say. I don't know if I buy it. In enterprise, women, I think, are leading the way. In general I think women are more cautious. So, the environmental piece is always front and center for me. But the people who are blowing it off without trying it and not like 10xing themselves, like I want to see, you know, women in business thrive. And if they automatically are a hard no on it, they're putting themselves at a disadvantage. So I worry about that a little bit.”

“I worry about schools. One of the things I really want to, where I want to move my consultancy, is into public schools because they are clueless. Teachers are free to do whatever they want with it. I think there needs to be governance specific to teachers, governance specific to admins, and more importantly special ed students versus typical students. I have a [REDACTED: family member]. An AI tutor probably would have made the last six years of his life a lot less hellish. So I worry about schools implementing it incorrectly and doing like a one-size-fits-all, which is not how it should be.”

“For myself, no. For others, yes. For myself, no. Because of the sheer volume of what I'm able to do now. And at my core, I'm a conversation designer and that is so deeply ingrained in me that even if I got a little rusty, it wouldn't take me long to get right back on the path. But for kids and teachers really freak me out. Like you know, the studies, as soon as kids' competency, everything, everything tanked as soon as Chromebooks entered the picture. And now we want to talk about kids using AI.”

“I unplug on the weekends. I go down in the art studio. I paint my brains out all weekend. I go in the garden.”

“I unplug. I leave my phone in the house. I play with my dogs. Like I purposefully unplug.”

“But I am a philanthropist at heart, so really for me it's closing those gaps, the gender gaps, the pay gaps, the poverty gaps. That to me would be the best thing that could happen.”

“And it's in my calendar because I integrated Claude with my calendar. So, that's really helped because like I said, I have ADHD and Claude really helps me, is helping me stay on task better because I have 50 squirrel moments a day. That's why I have literally like 40 Claude projects. I love the projects.”

“Then the next chapter is they rolled [generative AI] out at work and basically told us you better start using it. And they even, they don't monitor what we use, what we chat with it about, but they monitor how often we chat with it.”

“And then they kind of look for, all right, what have you done lately that's improved efficiency using ChatGPT, for example, and now Claude. So it's a little bit with a gun to my back that I find I'm dipping my toes into it deeper every day.”

“This year, the one-on-ones that I used to conduct with the team members, some were much better than others, but there wasn't a whole lot of consistency or structure to them, and I just felt like overall they could be better as a group. So, I turned that question over to ChatGPT and just asked for some best practice methods there. And it gave some pretty decent ideas. I'll say it gave me the good starts of ideas and then I would hone them myself and then bring it back to ChatGPT for kind of like a final "does this sound like a workable plan" and then say yes or no.”

“I've also run into some situations with ChatGPT where it will just obviously hallucinate something. The chief example I always have of that is there was a time where, literally, it was last November, I needed to make a calendar for like a newsletter that would have been the month of December and I just didn't feel like making the Word table. 00:06:41 So I asked it, "Make a Word table that's a calendar for the month of December with two rows for each date," that sort of thing, and it messed the dates up. Like if November started on a Monday, it had it starting on a Tuesday where none of the dates lined up.”

“The detraction I'll say is it's almost, the word I've used with my wife about it is that it is surprisingly seductive in that I might be overrelying on it suddenly. Have I gone from, because I'd always been a little bit of a kind of a Jared Spool skeptic about, hey, this is just a word association machine, this is like a magic trick, this isn't much substance to it, to now suddenly I do use it a lot more than I think I ever envisioned that I would. And in that ideation space, it's been a lot of help just for me to broaden the approaches that I bring to the work that I've got to do for the rest of my team. So, that's been helpful for me. It's almost kind of like having a small council of different personalities or different backgrounds or different perspectives to kind of push against my default way of doing things.”

“But again, on the detraction side, I kind of worry like how much of myself am I losing through this process because I'm just lazily relying on it now to provide me with all of the perspective. So yeah, that kind of concerns me.”

“So a lot of them are kind of what I would call purists. They see themselves as, "I work in Figma a lot. I sometimes do some research and that's about it." And so now stakeholder management, influencing without authority, communicating to different levels of audiences, things like that. They all needed that. ChatGPT really did help me with coming up with a 12-month comprehensive training plan that included both paid and free sources. I really went back and forth with it for a while on this one to really kind of hone this into something that was, that thus far has proven to be valuable and also feasible from both a cost and a time perspective. So, I was able to get that done much more quickly and much more comprehensively than I ever would have been able to by myself through just what I'll call old research methods now at this point of me just googling things and talking to people.”

“So I worry more about like what's going to happen the first time we get sued over a claim that we deny that we shouldn't have or something like that, that there's going to be a swing and a miss here. Are we overrelying on it when we're giving away so much of our processing, our manual data entry processing capabilities now over to AI? And I just wonder like are we building this house of cards now that's just eventually going to doom the company?”

“I honestly try to hedge against that by only asking it things where there is no quote unquote wrong answer, because like I said, because of that December calendar incident. I'm not 100% sure that I would trust it if I asked it what 2 plus 2 is half the time. So if I have a big hairy task that again would require processing tens of thousands of rows of data, I don't know that I would, I would probably ironically, and again this goes back to that concern that I have of am I now suddenly seduced into overrelying on it, but I would probably ask it to say, "Okay, process this 10,000-row file but then also tell me how should I double-check your work," which is circular reasoning in the worst sort of way. But yeah, I think ultimately my personal strategy is try not to use it in spaces where there is high risk and or where there is an absolute 00:17:02 need for 100% accuracy and then just stick to it more where the spaces are of, like, I know I keep saying it, but the idea generation where there really is no wrong answer per se, it's just input for me.”

“No, not at work at least. Let's put it that way. It seems to be kind of just this gold rush mentality of we're all expected to use it and then they sometimes ask us like, "What benefits have you been getting from it lately?" Just I think as a way really just to justify the cost of the licensing that they do. But beyond that, if you mean like any sort of like disclosure, so let's say for example when we turn in a report, "Last quarter, portions of this were created through generative AI means," nothing like that.”

“Anxious. Just because of the fact it just seems like it's come on too fast, too strong, too quickly. And without anybody really understanding any of the ramifications, governance, ethics, environmental concerns, economic concerns. Again, when the Sam Altman types of the world will talk about this golden utopia in the future where nobody has to do any sort of like drudgery work anymore. It's like, well, no offense to anybody, but the economy runs on an awful lot of people doing drudgery work. And what happens when all, you're just going to say these people just live a carefree life with no job anymore because there's nothing for them to do and they just have this limitless free time now because all that overhead has been lifted from their lives.”

“So I just don't know. I feel like it's just, I've said to my wife in the past, I think in the future, unfortunately, when we look back 30 years from now on this era of technological advancement, I think the legacy of this phase of AI, this gold rush mentality, is just going to really be exposing the greed of C-level executives in the world right now in that they would put their faith in anything which will allow them to say, "I'm the person who cut staff expenses by 30% and as a result you stakeholders all got higher dividends and I got a bigger bonus, so everybody wins." But that's just not true.”

“I mean, I watched both my kids when I was in school. My parents' biggest worry was, am I on drugs? When my kids were in school, like in high school, five, six years ago, my biggest worry was like, are they cheating off of others? Everyone seemed to be crowdsourcing all the homework. And I'm like, is anyone actually learning anything other than just how to get by in an ethically dubious way? And now I feel like AI has almost given rise to the legitimacy of that now in a way.”

“And when [his son] hits the job market, is he suddenly going to find that if he, for whatever reason, ChatGPT falls out of vogue, it becomes illegal, something unforeseeable happens. Does he, when you kick that crutch out from underneath him, is he capable of doing anything? Is anyone capable of doing anything? And I've seen some articles about this idea of just the stagnation of human capabilities. The more we lean on something that can do something so comprehensive for us, or at least that we believe to be so comprehensive for us. So that gives me concern for the future. I don't know what to tell either one of my kids about what's an AI-proof, if there even is such a thing. What's an AI-proof field of study for you, field of work for you? Or how should you again responsibly integrate it into your work in a way that's not eroding your own ability to think critically and put two and two together.”

“There's a blend across work and personal. Right now I'm getting my education doctorate. So I'm doing my whole dissertation on AI's role, like my evolution of my leadership skills in conjunction with gen AI. So I use it probably a lot between work and personal and school. For school I'll even have it read my writing and then give me like a review, and not do it for me but just tell me how to improve it. Or I see what it recommends for clarity and conciseness in the writing and then any kind of grammatical errors, I'll use it for that. I'll use it to brainstorm professional development ideas with me for teachers. As far as like, I use a lot of design thinking in the professional development sessions with teachers that I create, and I will have it reference design thinking protocols or design justice thinking protocols to make PD better than what I could do alone, because I have a very limited amount of time to create.”

“Yeah. So there's Copilot. We can use Copilot and we can use Canva AI. But I learned a thing. So, if I get off of the school district's network and use the guest network, I can access any AI I want.”

“Gemini and Perplexity. Yeah, those are the ones. I really love Gemini, but I use it every time I'm not on the school network.”

“Oh my goodness. Well, it's a new role that I started in June and I started the new role into administration in June. So, I'm trying to think, what did I used to do with it? Oh, AI. Okay. So, one thing, does it have to be in my role or can it be in my personal life? Okay. So, I used to meal plan without the use of AI and that was just like looking up recipes and then putting them in an app and the app would tell me what to go buy at the grocery store. Now, I just say, "Perplexity, I am wanting a high protein diet that's low cost. Tell me what to buy at the grocery store. You have all my health data. What should I be eating?" It creates the whole meal plan with the recipes and gives me the shopping list in less than a minute and I like that.”

“And then I use it, I still design as a side gig, and with client's approval I will write whole courses for them and just have it reference their writing style on their website. Well, this one client I have, she has a very unique voice that she speaks in and has podcasting and stuff. So, I'm like, just look up this site, write in her voice with this content and go.”

“So, I feel like I'm the only one in my organization, not the only one, I'm one of the ones in my organization that is setting those norms. So, for use, I'm trying to push a guideline for faculty and staff use of AI, like guidelines of what we use AI for, what's good use of AI, what shouldn't we put into AI for output.”

“Sometimes Perplexity will give me a bad link and I always check the links. I always go back and review the work that AI did in the background because I can go back and look at the source links and sometimes the links, like I noticed in Gemini when I was doing some research, I was asking general questions about AI use and I found it was citing sources that weren't as rigorous as others. It was citing blogs. It was just searching the internet. It wasn't doing an academic search of stuff that I could cite. So I would say that's kind of the part I don't trust. There's also another piece of trust that I don't have and that's bias.”

“So, this is something I think about a lot. I serve a majority minority district and what are the sources? What's the input? Because there's so much, like can I see the data set that AI was trained on? Because I want to know that when it's giving a teacher an answer, say they're not very, how do I put it, they're not very culturally sensitive, if it gives them something that's wrong I want them to be able to identify it.”

“But even, you know, so, and then there's another problem with it on a broader sense where I don't trust, because I was reading research that the UN is really pushing AI in the global south for teaching and learning to create learning management systems and to give students feedback. I don't trust that because the data set that they're using is so westernized. It seems like another version of colonization and cultural, how do I say that?”

“Like making culture homogeneous, I guess. So those are some of the things I think about when I think about trust.”

“I would just say it's about our own bias. Like, we live in a world that is not fair, it's not just, it's not equitable. And how is AI amplifying that in the world? That would be my only concern. Without checks, is it just, like, I've read a few studies where students were given feedback based on their writing and minority students were given less rigorous feedback from AI than Caucasian students. And then AI didn't recognize different dialects of English except for proper English. And then facial recognition didn't recognize Black students as human when they went in to be recognized for a test that was proctored, it didn't recognize their faces.”

“So that's the kind of thing that concerns me about AI. But I think as long as everyone has a seat at the design table and as long as we have this type of research and feedback from minority groups is used, I think we can mitigate the risk of bias.”

“Sometimes in my doctorate I worry about losing the ability to just find stuff in the library search engine. And I even went so far as to hire a tutor because I'm in my dissertation phase and I'm like, how do you know what words to search and what's going to bring you back the right research? And they're like, well, it's a process, a learning process that I feel like I'm missing out on. Like when I started design school we started with paper and pencil.”

“Like relearned design from a very non-technical standpoint and I feel like I'm losing out on that process if I just rely on AI to find the stuff for me. So I guess, but I guess maybe that's going to be a skill that's obsolete because I don't know the Dewey Decimal system.”

“Well, I kind of think of, I don't know that I have many concerns because when we, my only concern is that we don't start with the basics in school and that we give AI too soon. So I'm talking about elementary years, primary years. Because I'm thinking back to when I learned long division and multiplication and the basics of math, it was like learning a language without knowing you're learning a language.”

“There's a logic behind it. And I feel like if we skip over learning [the basics of math, long division and multiplication], maybe we'll have people who can't think for themselves. But we're starting to see that now with students coming up because they're over-tested, just because of over-testing. So I feel like, you know, we used to farm and we used to be really active and walk and now we just go to the gym. So those who have the motivation to hone their creative thinking or critical thinking skills, they will. Those who don't want to won't. And that's where the divide will be, I think.”

“Well, I kind of think of, I don't know that I have many concerns because when we, my only concern is that we don't start with the basics in school and that we give AI too soon. So I'm talking about elementary years, primary years. Because I'm thinking back to when I learned long division and multiplication and the basics of math, it was like learning a language without knowing you're learning a language.”

“There's a logic behind it. And I feel like if we skip over learning [the basics of math, long division and multiplication], maybe we'll have people who can't think for themselves. But we're starting to see that now with students coming up because they're over-tested, just because of over-testing. So I feel like, you know, we used to farm and we used to be really active and walk and now we just go to the gym. So those who have the motivation to hone their creative thinking or critical thinking skills, they will. Those who don't want to won't. And that's where the divide will be, I think.”

“That's a good question. I don't, no, I don't think it has changed how people value my, the output is, I can say productivity-wise it's definitely sped things up, you know, things that could derail me in the styling of something it can just sort of just get the information presented properly. And then the tone of voice which is really important, it's like I did a test a couple weeks ago. The voice was sort of with an executive assistant compared with an English professor. So same text and I got two different answers. So being able to do that for different audiences I think is really helpful. You know, the whole storytelling thing that is really important, especially talked about in the UX research read-up.”

“My biggest win I'd say being able to do the business plans, pitch decks, financials. There's also like formulas that were given that, I'm not a math guy, so having those to be able to put in Excel or what have you is really helpful. Anything math-heavy would be, you know, anything that would help with quant or whatever, big help for me.”

“Okay. So an ongoing chat I have in Gemini, I saw past tense being used in a conversation. So I asked at the current time which was off, which was really sort of shocking to me, and it's obviously not a constant, you'd think maybe a computer would be. So I had to ask it to going forward always refer to the atomic clock. So occasionally I'll ask what time it is and sometimes it'll also tell me what time it is when I answer for a new part of the chat. But I think critical thinking is so so important because I will notice in this ongoing chat things that are left out, I will question and they'll act like they forgot. I don't know where that disconnect is, but I would say if you're not really critically thinking about the information you're getting, it's going to probably let you down in some ways.”

“I haven't seen any mention of having to do that, but I'd say for something that was totally certain by either statistical data, I mean, I think you need a disclaimer saying these numbers need to be double-checked for accuracy for sure. Anything that goes into the area, you know, we're going to make this big million-dollar decision based on this widget not working correctly, you know, that's what has to be double-checked.”

“So, it's RRCC: Role, Result, Context, Constraint. So before I even put in what I want, the information question, I do the role I want it to play, the result I want, you know, the goal, context, constraint. So say, here's the example: role is "act as an expert movie buff," result, "I'm looking for listing of movies playing my area," goal, "to take my family, friends who are fun," context, "I live in such-and-such city," constraint, "limit list to non-rated R movies." So that really helped with certain outputs and that's something I will most likely use predominantly going forward.”

“Yeah, I think that could happen. You know, instead of going through material myself, notes and sort of collating myself and thinking that out. Yeah, I could see that skill going downhill. It's almost like my handwriting skills gone downhill as I type more and more for text. I noticed that dexterity isn't quite what it should be sometimes.”

“I can see the same sort of parallel. Yeah, for sure. And that's not a good thing, especially for aging populations. You know, they need to keep that brain strong.”

“Okay. So an ongoing chat I have in Gemini, I saw past tense being used in a conversation. So I asked at the current time which was off, which was really sort of shocking to me, and it's obviously not a constant, you'd think maybe a computer would be. So I had to ask it to going forward always refer to the atomic clock. So occasionally I'll ask what time it is and sometimes it'll also tell me what time it is when I answer for a new part of the chat. But I think critical thinking is so so important because I will notice in this ongoing chat things that are left out, I will question and they'll act like they forgot. I don't know where that disconnect is, but I would say if you're not really critically thinking about the information you're getting, it's going to probably let you down in some ways.”

“So that actually, I used to work at [former company] and I started as just a presentation specialist putting together all the PowerPoints for the senior leadership and then maybe a year and a half into that I got moved to the Chief of Staff team for one of the EVPs that was data and analytics, and then became decisions and analytics, and they started talking about ChatGPT and how [former company] was getting involved with AI. And one of the VPs that I was supporting, Ragu, he was like, to me, the genius in AI, everything, you know, it's that kind of person you look and said, "Oh my gosh." And when they said, "Ragu, where should I go?" It's like, "Well you start playing with ChatGPT, look for Google, some classes." And then I start like dipping a little bit and then my first experiment was, okay, let me, in my personal, let's start with the personal first because [former company] was kind of funny, they were exploring a lot of things in AI but everything was like firewalled so everybody was trying at home but we could not actually try. It was kind of, I never understood that whole rationale behind.”

“So my first win was I took a picture of my fridge and I gave a prompt saying, "Today, you're my personal chef, create for me easy to put together recipes for the week and keep shopping at minimum. I like this, this and this. You are allowed to use all or any of the ingredients, not necessarily everything at once." So, it was very descriptive of what I needed to do, what kind of task, and then I was like, whoa. I got out the whole menu for like four days and I was like, I like that. Then I was like, okay, I'm going to test my pantry. So I went there and I did, okay, now I need something and now I'm trying to do other things. Then I moved to the financial part of it. So okay, I started testing areas and I was like, okay, this is better than me, you know, that's going to be my new BFF. You know, Google is no longer my BFF, you know, it's just my acquaintance nowadays.”

“And then I started using ChatGPT and from there I moved into Claude. And because of this then I was like, okay, how can I do this on my professional side? Because one of the great things that I did, since last time we connected, I took a certification in neuro-linguistic programming. So I was doing mentoring and coaching and I was running the DEI council and the mentorship program for [former company] for our business unit. So I was like, okay, how am I going to put together the content since English is not my first language? So let's use ChatGPT to polish it off, how to get a tone for the executive level. So that, it was funny because I learned a lot from ChatGPT, like how should I talk to, how should I write something. So I didn't use it in a sense of, okay, do for me and that's it. But I did in a sense of, okay, do once, do twice, and then after that I always start writing my own things and ask ChatGPT to polish it off, or Claude, and the changes were minimal.”

“So that was kind of helping the background in my English, like the writing skills, but also kind of making it easy and faster. Okay, that's the communication that I need to send for all the mentees for this week, what they need to do or not. So just give the bullet points and ask them to create. So I start moving like that. And because we could not use this at work, I was doing my personal on my phone and then I was emailing myself at work, said "midnight ideas, insomnia crisis." So people said, "Oh my gosh, P13 is having brilliant moments, you know, at night." But it's like, they're blocking. But it was funny because most of the VPs were doing the same thing.”

“Those are the parameters, deliver for me by 8 a.m. every day the top 15 jobs. So that's what I start doing, you know, find all the blind spots. Now I'm updating my portfolio because everything that I have designed, not just for [former company] but for [previous employer], I cannot publish because the whole confidentiality. I do have the hard copy. So now I'm converting my pieces into case studies and trying to find a way around, because when you submit your portfolio for review, if they don't see the images they automatically disqualify you. So it's like, okay, a site cannot have the images but if I don't have the images I don't get the job. So I started doing those day searches and project management too. So that's how that started and I'm loving it. I'm taking also, this past weekend I got, it's a very basic thing but it's been helping me a lot, it's from Cursive.io. So it's a very basic course for all those most used AI tools, so Lovable, Claude, Midjourney, little classes that teach me the basics so I know a little glimpse of what I can do with each. So that's what I've been up to now.”

“But what is very disappointing, and I think that's a common agreement with everybody that I talk to, information about AI tools is always scattered. So you don't have like, say, I'm still trying to learn Figma, okay, and I go there and I start like, okay, and then I go someplace else. And it's the same thing when I say, okay, where is a tool for ChatGPT, where can I find the tips, the tricks, you know, the dos and don'ts? Or what are the top skills, the top AI tools that people are using? Because each company, when they look for jobs, they have different tools they're using for AI. So where do I go, where do I learn, where do you know, are those actual resources? I feel everything is so scattered. Sometimes you find stuff on YouTube, sometimes on Instagram or LinkedIn, or, you know, that's the biggest blocker that I have.”

“Well it's what happens all the time because AI is a tool and a tool that's based on algorithms. So any wrong command, any wrong prompt is going to trigger a not so accurate response. So normally when I think about like, for example, my investments or some of the accounts, I was like, well 1 + 1 equals, why are you giving me 4.2? What's irrational. And a lot of times I compare Claude with ChatGPT and I say, okay, you know, this is wrong, or whatever the situation. And I caught it a lot of times. Say I give a table for you to tell me what's going on and you're not reading the table properly. It's like, okay, do your job as you should do. And my response, because there is, so you have at the end of the day it's not about the AI, it's how can you use it? How can you leverage?”

“They do. I think one thing that I noticed is the older you get, the more skeptical you are. I noticed that the younger generation, and again not being judgmental, but I was working with the millennials, the new alpha, and those generations, I cannot keep track of which, whatever name they are now, but they're like, "Oh, AI said so, it's the right way." And you check the older people, they had more experience, like, "No, might be a better way to do that." So I noticed that I would say 30s, mid-30s and older, they had more critical thinking, a little more common sense. The younger, like the early career, like the late teens, early 20s, they're more into, "No, no, no, let's do this. Let's trust AI and that's it." So, as a whole, I see the biggest thing with the age group.”

“In some places, yes. I just came back from Brazil. I was there for a whole month with my mom. And over there a lot of places, if they do images with AI, they put an AI credit, you know, on the image. So they are disclosing. Movies, anything that's done with AI. Here, very sporadic. I see that. But I feel that at some point we need to have some norms, some rules. Because the deepfakes, they know, I mean, we have elections coming up here. We have elections in Brazil. I mean, there's so much, so many things that AI can do to damage. I think it needs, it needs somehow to have some sort of rule, some kind of criteria that we can get things, you know, okay, you can only do A if you do B, otherwise it's going to be like nobody's land.”

“And so, I need you to do, and what tools I'm giving to you. So, like, pretty much I fill those three bullets. So, okay, today you are my financial advisor. You're going to select for me the top 10 stocks and I want them to be in the logistic industry. So I give those specifics. Or, you know, today you're my content creator, I'm creating this email for this audience, needs to communicate this message. So it's like, which hat you wearing, what's the task you need to do, and what are the constraints or, you know, whatever background. So that's the three items on my formula, my three pillars that make my use successful.”

“I would say the biggest fear is no guides. Like there's no rules to punish anybody that's using AI to harm the world. Okay? So no matter, you know, to start a war, to contaminate food, whichever, you know, when you're using AI to cause harm and there's no rule to punish those people, there's no way to stop them. So that's my biggest fear, the lack of police per se.”

“I think unless you know how to use it, most of the, I don't see UX designers surviving in 10 years from now. It's sad that I'm saying this, I mean, I'm passionate about that, but AI is taking over. So anybody who has strategic thinking can take over anything. You know, you can use any tool to do graphical design, UX design, anything that was done by a human before as far as creativity can be done by AI.”

“And I've seen this on job posts, like the tools required are different by same industry, by different companies. So, I don't have a, like, financial, like, that's the standard for financial is this, or the standard for healthcare. No, like, I was doing, like, for, like, say, presentations for education. Each company is asking for a different tool with AI. So I think that's the biggest gap, the lack of standards. We don't have a go-to. We have too many options and it's almost like you have to be like the jack of all trades, the unicorn of AI.”

“And then I started using ChatGPT and from there I moved into Claude. And because of this then I was like, okay, how can I do this on my professional side? Because one of the great things that I did, since last time we connected, I took a certification in neuro-linguistic programming. So I was doing mentoring and coaching and I was running the DEI council and the mentorship program for [former company] for our business unit. So I was like, okay, how am I going to put together the content since English is not my first language? So let's use ChatGPT to polish it off, how to get a tone for the executive level. So that, it was funny because I learned a lot from ChatGPT, like how should I talk to, how should I write something. So I didn't use it in a sense of, okay, do for me and that's it. But I did in a sense of, okay, do once, do twice, and then after that I always start writing my own things and ask ChatGPT to polish it off, or Claude, and the changes were minimal.”

“So that was kind of helping the background in my English, like the writing skills, but also kind of making it easy and faster. Okay, that's the communication that I need to send for all the mentees for this week, what they need to do or not. So just give the bullet points and ask them to create. So I start moving like that. And because we could not use this at work, I was doing my personal on my phone and then I was emailing myself at work, said "midnight ideas, insomnia crisis." So people said, "Oh my gosh, P13 is having brilliant moments, you know, at night." But it's like, they're blocking. But it was funny because most of the VPs were doing the same thing.”

“Yeah. I mean, I think what we're trying to do, which we've been trying to do for the past couple years, is really ambitious, which is to create healthcare applications with a sort of modular application building tool and to create the whole backend so that their applications are possible to be used within the healthcare context. And I think late last year, as we've been struggling through putting this [application] all together, one of our engineers started leaning more into Claude Code at the same time that some of the big advances happened and made a ton of progress and was able to hook up our own instance of an LLM to start creating those applications and it actually worked. We had the building blocks figured out and it was putting it together in a way that was like, oh, we thought that this would come at some point and now it's come and now we have to catch up and work around it and try to figure out. And for me as a designer it was like all of a sudden”

“I'm maybe not one step behind but two or three steps behind. There was one instance where we've been discussing the experience of using conversational AI in our tool and what the engineer had done was working but it was kind of overwhelming in terms of everything that was a part of the UX. And so we were trying to find time for me to collaborate with him because he's been building with AI. And that was I think the first moment I'm like okay I'm just going to see what I can do with Claude Code and start doing it. And I kind of just went in deep for a couple days and was able to rebuild it with Claude Code successfully to, just the front end, but to illustrate the experience that we wanted and it felt like okay now I can kind of play, now it's kind of like fighting fire with fire like I can compete a little bit in that process. And so that was really impressive to me for the first time.”

“I think because we're a startup and we're really like 10 people, day-to-day and we're dealing with AI ourselves, it's been mostly bottom up. I think at some point, well at some point it was a little bit top down. Early this year we sort of refocused our efforts and knowing what AI could do and what our engineer was able to do, we said, "Okay, now we want to be much more ambitious and work through all this backlog that we thought was going to take months in a shorter amount of time." And so everybody needs to be using the cloud and everybody gets a subscription. We're going to do this with the people we have. And so that was one instance of it being top down, but everyone was already dabbling with it before then.”

“Everything we're doing is building the plane as it flies. And I have work in Figma which hasn't been fully translated into our product. And so that work is still there to actually do those refinements, and even to truly implement the designs from Figma into code while we're still building out new features and whatnot. And so sometimes I'm using it to do the work that a front-end engineer might do to clean up our implementation.”

“So we are using it a little bit for that too. But it hasn't gone back into Figma yet. I feel like that's still a work in progress. And then there are times like when I was taking that LLM kind of experience, the chat-based interface project, and I spent just a couple days just working on that and I was really designing as I was building it because I had my engineer's work to start from so I was refining their work, I was cleaning up what they had done. But there would be times when I'd give maybe a general prompt and the output, maybe 50% of the output worked and 50% didn't. So, I say, "Oh, that's a good idea. We'll keep that, but then change these five things." And it's just kind of like an iterative building process. There have been other times where I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to try and use Figma Make because I haven't used it very much" and I'll give it an idea that I'm working on and the output just took a while and it's not helpful at all.”

“I think because my work has been more just front end, I haven't gotten in trouble yet with anything. There's definitely one instance in our company, we have a siloed off instance of Claude that has all of our product context in it that, because we're on Azure, we have to use and I'm on Mac but I have to use a virtual desktop to use, and it has all of the context for our product and so you can ask it questions and it will give pretty good technical answers. And I think one of our salespeople or product people was responding to a client and used a different instance of Claude and it gave him a plausible answer that ended up in a client email that was wrong. And that was not good and that had to be, that was sort of like a step back moment for the company to say please be careful and please validate everything you're seeing coming out of the LLMs.”

“The other thing I've seen us do, which is hard and I don't think it's completely something that we figured out yet, is like we'll have a sort of analyst or subject matter expert in [the industry we serve] who's very technical who will start to build out a concept using AI or in the context of what we're doing and it will get maybe two or three steps before anybody has questioned it and it'll go through maybe our engineer too and start being implemented before we've been able to take a step back and say "maybe that wasn't a good idea.”

“Some are front end, sort of like a dashboard kind of analysis view. And if we come to a new client or a use case that doesn't fit within that schema of building blocks, we sort of have to take a step back and reconsider. Do we need a new one or does it fit? Do we have to broaden the definition of one of them? And definitely a couple people are using AI to try and figure that part of it out. So propose a new building block that fits within our system. I think sometimes I am seeing the result of that work with AI a few steps down the chain and I have to question whether that was a good idea. So maybe the AI proposed a new structure to how our product works and I disagree with it because it doesn't take into the context of whether an end user will be able to make sense of it.”

“Yeah, that is also happening and I haven't talked about that yet. I mean this is almost like very detailed product documentation but it's also that we have sort of a process of them going through AI to come up with that and then come up with the technical details to start implementing it. Also they are vibe coding some of those interfaces and sharing them with me and the team, and that's been its own interesting challenge. How so? Tell me more about that. So I think there are a few aspects of it. In [our customers' industry] I think the bar in terms of end UI design is not always terribly high and so when someone vibe codes a design, puts it out there like "oh we're done, look, so and so did it, it's there," and I start looking at it and there are some things on the surface that are fine and they're working and maybe there are a few good ideas that I haven't thought of too.”

“But then you start to peel away the surface and there's so much that doesn't make sense in terms of what we're doing and the layout in addition to just like maybe the design system we're using. It doesn't map to the design system we've already established. And so there's all those aspects of it, but then there's even translating the domain and the intent into the interface that I never, like sometimes I'll just, in the past maybe I'll get handed one of these live coded interfaces without that context and I'll have to go back, either I'll have to do my best to extract that intent out of the interface or I'll have to go back and ask 20 questions just to figure out what was going on. And so this is something I sort of have unsuccessfully proposed which is that we do a better job of documenting our intent if anybody's going to be vibe coding interfaces and put some structure to that so that we can say, okay, so and so made an example of this application, what were you thinking, what were you hoping to accomplish, and with the idea that maybe if that was documented we could assess it together and see whether it was working.”

“But I would say that any sort of documentation in that process has been unsuccessful so far. It's been more like, okay, you did this, now we have to meet to walk through what you were thinking. And was this intentional or was that intentional?”

“We sort of raised that flag and had to move on because we knew it was just how we were building it. And then until recently we came across a new scenario where we had a whole other kind of, a patient-facing example, and we had to take a step back and our engineer had to basically re-engineer how that was working so that it wasn't generative anymore but it was only generative based on a design system that was already defined, which is I think how my vision of it was already but we weren't there yet. So now that we have that structure in place, there's work for me to go back and make sure that the design system it's referencing makes sense. But at least that's open to us now. And that is more context into why a vibe-coded app, when you don't have that design system in place, has even more weight because there's nothing to ground it.”

“I feel like we're all using it so much. No, I think we all know that we're all using it so much. I think it's not, there's just in the context of our day-to-day work with these 10 people, I mean, I will call out I think I probably use it less for my day-to-day thinking than other people do. So, if we're having a product kind of conversation remotely, somebody might respond to my question with what I know is an AI output. Rather than somebody sending me a few sentences, they'll send me two pages worth of AI output of a concept and I'll have to read through it and see if it makes sense.”

“It's frustrating. Yeah, I think it's frustrating because I think some people have just been more trusting of it. And yeah, kind of phoning it in. There have been maybe a couple times where I've actually called out like, I don't want to know what Claude thinks about this. I just want to know what you think. Like, here's why this doesn't make sense. Tell me what you think. How does that go over when you say that? I think I've received silence as a response to that before, but I feel like because we've had some more visible failures with sort of letting AI move too quickly, that's been happening less. So we've had more, I think we're more aware of where it can fail if we don't watch it in our process.”

“There's an aspect of it that feels very empowering when I'm trying to build out an idea quickly. There's been a couple times where I'm building something in Claude Code and it's felt like it's nice to have an iterative design process in actual code. Which is really cool. Like I used to work in Flash a long long time ago and when we were doing work in Flash, Flash was the output because it would be embedded into a website. So you were building what would be the final product which felt really gratifying and so there's an aspect of that that I appreciate. But it also feels like in general there's so much anxiety around it. And it feels like I don't have a choice. Like I don't have a choice but to fight fire with fire because that's what's going on, to sort of keep up and not be left behind, and that doesn't feel great.”

“Yeah. I mean I think when AI can work right now, I think this is true for engineering but for design because that's what I know, it's because you have somebody with the judgment to know when the output is working or not working or quality or not quality and you can adjust from there, but that comes from experience. And it's almost like managing a type of more junior role except faster and so your brain has to move faster. And so that is a really good question because you don't get that judgment and that experience without doing the work and being hands-on in it in a way.”

“So there are certain things that I don't know if people will need to pick up in the future, like I don't know some of the detailed UI kind of work which the details of were tedious and took a long time in the past and now they're so automatic, or even like responsive design patterns. It was such a tedious thing before and it's so much easier now. And will there be a need for people to learn that? That's a good question. I don't know. But there's another aspect of just designing something to a certain context or problem that will be really important. So how do you train people to do that? Well, it will be interesting. My wife actually teaches English as a part-time lecturer at a university and she's gone from trying to have students use AI in really specific ways to being, like this current class, she's having them write everything by hand in the context of the classroom. She can't trust anything anymore. And it's going to be extremely painful for them, but they're actually, the idea is that they're actually learning and doing the work.”

“So we got Claude Code and Cursor with a whole suite of models, lots of tokens. And they basically trained all of us, sent us to training. And so we started using it with large context availability. I'd say over the last year it's evolved into vibe coding with verification. And now we're realizing, well, the volume of code is not something we can really manually inspect. Although there's some things that we have to inspect because it's going to DoD or military and government. So, we don't know what the policy is yet. It's kind of, we're in this wild frontier of, okay, we're using the tools because we're told to, but what does this mean from a customer's perspective? Who's going to accept it? Who's not? I don't think I'm in a position to really... it's not like my opinions are going to influence the company at all, but those are questions I have as I dive in head first.”

“And that's kind of the goal of the company is to get to that. So in essence, I'm building my replacement, which is going to be this robot. And I say that jokingly, but it's also serious. And I understand that that's really what's happening.”

“That's if AI does everything perfectly. But we all know it hallucinates and it's interesting because when multiple things hallucinate then you've got this chain reaction of everything going off the rails.”

“So it would need access to GCP and Azure. It would need access to our Bamboo and the other tools that are in the infrastructure that are needed for this production so that it could do the full cycle. So right now I'm the monkey in the middle. I tell it what to do in the tangible code. It does it. Now I have to run the test, take the logs from it, and feed it back and say check the logs, did it work or did it not? So I'm really in the way of the velocity.”

“My current work is to meet the security technical implementation guide from the DSA, the defense industry. So they have a huge list of requirements for, we'll just call it security hardening, and there are tools out there for scanning. So I have to build an image, scan it, look at it, look at the requirements, and there's not always a mitigation or remediation that is something you could script. Sometimes it's a site policy that has to be manually done, like it could be password complexity rules or checks that have to be done manually by somebody on site. So the process spans both code and policy documentation, and that really varies from customer to customer. So it's not the best example of how to use the AI to take on a bunch of requirements. I can take them one by one and say, "Hey, how do I remediate this?" And sometimes it can be done with scripting or some tweaks in the OS or whatever, but closing the loop of, "Hey, just take this whole document that's a thousand pages and implement everything," well, the government's going to come back and say, "Where's your audit trail of your development?" And I'm going to say, "Oh, well, I just told Claude to do it." I don't know how that's going to fly.”

“Which goes back to my earlier point about, well, what's the position of these customers about us as a provider building software that they're going to buy using these tools. Enterprise customers probably don't care but some of these federal and military ones might have a different opinion.”

“From the top down they're pushing it. So, I think a lot of employees were resistant to it, including myself. Initially, I wanted to play with it, but I didn't know how best to integrate it into my daily workflow. I don't know what initiated their desire to do this. I don't know where the seed of that came from, but once they decided we're all in and they spent the money on the tools, they spent money on training, they've created dynamic forums and everyone is sharing information about how they are using it, best practices. They want everyone to be sharing what they're doing and how they're doing it. We have sharing meetings, weekly AI success stories. Here's what we did with it. We had one person, a senior architect that I know personally, he had domain knowledge of contact centers, not contact centers... email servers, sorry, voicemail systems. All the words are swirling. Maybe it's the whiskey. I don't know.”

“So there's multiple solutions in the company because of the history of acquisitions. And so he thought, well, what if I just start greenfield and say, I know all the requirements. I know all the features. I know everything I want. In 48 hours with Claude Code, he had a working prototype and he spent another week polishing it and it was integrated with all existing systems. And the CEO called a special all-employee meeting to have him present it because it was a wakeup call that this is what we're going to be up against in the marketplace. There are going to be companies, new upstarts, existing companies that are going to be using these tools in this way. And it doesn't matter how good your old product was, right? If you realize the power and speed of AI, then granted, we don't know what the real cost is going to be.”

“And are the AI vendors going to be like crack dealers that say, "Oh, the first taste is affordable," and then they're going to turn the screws on us and now what? We're stuck with a codebase that no monkey in the company can grok, right? And so you're stuck. You need the AI to support the AI because Pandora's box has been opened and this is just one sphere of it, right? I try to push all that aside because I'm having fun with the shiny new toy and trying to figure out how to best use it.”

“Yeah, I think about this every day. That's why I said earlier that I feel fortunate that this is happening at the end of my career because, while I can see there's room for people to use the tools, once they get to the lights out software factory then the entry level coder is not needed anymore.”

“And what do you lose with that? Well, we take for granted our ability to think about software the way we think about it. And I have to think that education has to change because they can't be producing software coders anymore. That's not the skill that's valuable. They need to be thinking higher level. I think that's going to be the next shift. The growing pain of, oh well, this field that has existed for the last 50 years, more than that, I don't know, software has been around longer than I've been alive, so 60 years let's say. It's been more or less the same. Yes, the capability of the computers has improved, the languages have changed, but the principles really haven't. The development methodologies have evolved.”

“Maybe for the worse because I don't like Agile. I miss the old waterfall days where you had a design on paper before you start coding. Actually, iterative development was fun. Prototyping and iterating on that, I think, was my favorite method of work. But I think in the short term it's going to impact the people who just graduated. I feel bad for them because they've been told, just get a degree in software, computer science or software development or whatever. And now that's not the skill that's going to have any value because the value of that career is the experience that you learn over time through coming up through the junior ranks and dealing with all these problems in the field or in your own code. You learn a lot about, well, how do we avoid this? And to some extent some of those learnings are not valuable because the AI is going to take care of that. It's going to be doing the mechanics of writing code and finding the bugs. So that's not the skill that's needed anymore. The skill that's needed is again the higher level, like the solution level capability of going to a customer, getting requirements, building a spec, giving it to AI, and somehow making sure that what goes back to the customer meets that.”

“And that isn't software anymore. That's something else. I don't know. And we're in that period right now where we're learning these tools, trying to make the company successful because we have to use the tools because we're afraid that if we don't find a way to... and I don't know what the end is, how it's going to stabilize, right? It's shifting month by month. It's shifting.”

“It can be great as a conversation tool or great from a design tool of iterating quickly, but I still think we need to be cautious because the same way that we would want to only show grayscale designs at the beginning of an ideation session, you don't want to show a full clickable prototype either.”

“I think that goes with anything that we research online. You know, just because you Google something doesn't mean it's fact. It's all in reference to the context that you give it. So analyzing metrics, analyzing statistics, I took a stats psychology class back in my undergrad and it's given me a whole different perspective on statistics. Like, you can look at statistics five different ways and it's going to give you five different answers.”

“Because we're using it to build at least beginning screens or wireframes, I'm not improving my craft as I used to. I'm not designing in Figma, previously Sketch at our company, as frequently as I used to. So, I feel like I might be losing some of my skills.”

“The same thing goes for the people who started their career, um, during covid. They never, like, I spent the first four years of my IT and design career in an office where we had access to leadership, we had access to networking, we had real people to talk to.”

“Our organization is all about it. They're like, 'Use AI for anything and everything. Find ways to create efficiencies.' And even to the point of, like, if we're not using AI, that's a problem... I don't think they do [measure compliance]. I don't know how to answer that question.”

“A lot of the time I'm the type of person that, like, I can describe what I want, but I'm having a difficult time with, like, I'm a process brain first versus a visual person. Once you have the visual then I'm like, oh okay, I can run with this.”

“Where do we have gaps in our finances that we could cut that we're not seeing? Like, here's all of our charges, where are hidden subscriptions that we don't see, or where are areas that we could cut back?”

“Using it for my personal objectives at work is fantastic and everyone does it. Which I will say is kind of a drawback, though, because supervisors are also doing it to give feedback. And I'm like, is that feedback something that you truly think, or are you getting it from the tool?”

“More people are disclosing, like, 'this was created with AI' as a tagline, or 'AI-generated image,' or 'made with the assistance of this tool.' We have always been, the people on my team have always been encouraged of, you always disclose if this is something that you made in Figma Make.”

“They need to be able to learn what are ways to still work without AI, but how do we use it to make the world better?”

“I think it can expand on ideas that are already generated, but it still needs people to feed it. We still need people to come up with new things, right, to feed the tools.”

“I use it a lot for just bouncing ideas off of someone when I don't necessarily know the answer.”

“It would be really cool to have a tool created for learning and training that can adapt based on, like, for example, I really want to learn more about visual design. If Figma had an AI tool that I could interact with in real time and I can learn it, and it can give me real feedback of, 'okay, the way that you did this isn't the most efficient way of doing it. Let me show you how to do it in real time,' rather than having a one-on-one session with a person.”

“I use it a lot for just bouncing ideas off of someone when I don't necessarily know the answer, or like getting, doing quick research.”

“My husband is a very numbers person. So being able to use it for that has been, I think, the most, like, my big "oh wow" moment was like, oh my gosh, I can do meal planning for my family without having to do all this extra work. And then I can feed it different variables. And then using it for. My husband does it for more of a technical deep dive, because I'm not the person that you talk to about all of these servers and data and stuff. But being able to essentially be a financial planner for us without paying for one. Because we tend to research a lot of things on our own and it just really speeds up that process.”

“The other area that I've used it for most recently is with Figma. I'm not a big fan of Miro's AI capabilities. I don't think they're that good, but I'm using it for synthesizing research. So having spent almost an entire day synthesizing sticky notes or notes or interviews, if I'm able to do interviews, we have a research team, but being able to take a bunch of information that I would have to manually sift through to identify trends, being able to put a bunch of different formats of data, of information, and have it summarize it is really the biggest difference. So, especially with Figma, unfortunately we have a token limit now, but being able to just bounce ideas through the system and come up with a solution that I'm like, okay, how could I imagine this complex solution? Because a lot of the time I'm the type of person that, like, I can describe what I want, but I'm having a difficult time with, like, I'm a process brain first versus a visual person.”

“Once you have the visual then I'm like, oh okay, I can run with this. So I think most recently Figma Make has been the biggest change. But I think just the synthesizing of information, that you can just put it in a tool and have it spit out a summary, that has been the biggest change for me as a designer.”

“And then same thing for personal, like most recently I've used it for, here's a picture of my room, I need you to decorate it for me. Or, here is our finances. Where do we have gaps in our finances that we could cut that we're not seeing? Like, here's all of our charges, where are hidden subscriptions that we don't see, or where are areas that we could cut back? That's the biggest change that we've been able to make, is doing our own forecasting without actually manually writing the tool ourselves.”

“Our organization is all about it. They're like, "Use AI for anything and everything. Find ways to create efficiencies." And even to the point of, like, if we're not using AI, that's a problem.”

“I don't think they do. I mean, in my organization, at my level, they know if we share it. I don't know how to answer that question. I mean, I think in the development teams they're using it a lot more because there's other AI integrations in the development tools that they use.”

“But from design it's like they're all about using AI, but it's almost scary because I have some teams that work with business that are like, "well, here, I just made this in Figma Make. Can you just make this?" And there has to be some boundaries with certain product teams because that's not necessarily something that we would want to make. But yeah, I mean, from a measuring perspective, I'm sure there are ways that they're measuring it. I don't know what they are, unfortunately.”

“Yeah. So, luckily it hasn't been with my direct team. It's been with a co-worker. Their product owners have been using either Figma Make or, I don't know if they've been able to use Miro.”

“But those are the two programs that we use most, and they will come up with a design and essentially it's like, "well, why does it take you so much longer to do what I could do here in five minutes?" So I think it's a balance of using it as a communication, like gently saying "stay in your lane" but also using it as a communication tool of, "okay, well, tell me more about why you think this is the best solution and maybe there's gaps in our communication." Because we also have to. I think there are integrations that they can use, like our own design system. Because just because Figma Make comes up with a design doesn't mean that it is in compliance with our design guidelines. So keeping that in perspective: there's this big project that is being done at the very high leadership level, that someone put together an idea in Figma Make and the development team and leadership thought, like, "okay this is ready to go and ready to be built." And it was really just a tool to explain what could be done.”

“So that's kind of the other aspect of design, is using it and sharing it with business and they're like, "okay, well, let's go build it." And it's like, well, this is just a tool, this is a starting point, let's build on it, like, understand where are the data points and what. This is not actually built in a true design fashion. We haven't figured out dependencies or anything like that. So I see it on both ends. It can be great as a conversation tool or great from a design tool of iterating quickly, but I still think we need to be cautious because the same way that we would want to only show grayscale designs at the beginning of an ideation session, you don't want to show a full clickable prototype either.”

“Like, is their summary similar to what I came up with? Or like grouping stickies together. I still like to do that manually. But when it comes to. Oh, the other thing is transcripts. In Microsoft Teams, we use the AI notes and transcripts that way. Not the best, but also better than nothing. Being able to just take a lot of information and pull it together into a summary is the biggest win for me, because I used to spend days on synthesizing research data, or recording, you know, I used to sift through recordings and take notes and all that. But I think that's the biggest win overall. But like using it for my personal objectives at work is fantastic and everyone does it. Which I will say is kind of a drawback, though, because supervisors are also doing it to give feedback. And I'm like, is that feedback something that you truly think, or are you getting it from the tool?”

“I don't know if I've had design failures per se yet, but I will say getting down a rabbit hole with it and then having it not take my prompts. But again, that's not something that I necessarily had before. I wouldn't say. Well, I guess maybe losing my edge with actual design. I mean, it was never my forte to begin with, but because we're using it to build at least beginning screens or wireframes, I'm not improving my craft as I used to. I'm not using Figma design. I'm not designing in Figma, previously Sketch at our company, as frequently as I used to. So, I feel like I might be losing some of my skills.”

“Yeah, I think that's my biggest concern is, when is this going to make us irrelevant? I don't think so, because there's still something to say about best practices, and understanding the problem fully, and being able to ask questions on the fly. Could someone use a tool to do that? Maybe. But it's like the memes that you see out there, like the rules. It's like, you still have to understand all the complex problems that a business customer needs has, right? Or understand the technical architecture. I could see part of someone's job putting in all of the design criteria, but then I think it's going to fall flat because people aren't going to actually do that. They're just going to say, "Well, I'm just going to design it the way that I want to.”

“I don't know if there's actually been a time that I trusted it and I shouldn't have. If I've been unsure, I'm always one that reviews it. So I never trust it at face value. I will still go review it and determine, like, is this actually what I told it? Is this not? So I can't really say that's something I've encountered. It could have been something I encountered if I didn't review it. It messed up my interactions in a prototype that I was trying to create because the prompt didn't account for it. It messed up the interaction. So, I had to go back and revert and rewrite the prompt. But I think to make sure that we don't take things at face value, you still have to have that analytical thinking, right?”

“So you review it, you determine, does this make sense? And if it doesn't, research it on your own and come up with the answer. I think that goes with anything that we research online. You know, just because you Google something doesn't mean it's fact. It's all in reference to the context that you give it. So analyzing metrics, analyzing statistics. I took a stats psychology class back in my undergrad and it's given me a whole different perspective on statistics. Like, you can look at statistics five different ways and it's going to give you five different answers. It's just depending on, how do you want that to come off? How do you want that to be portrayed by your reader?”

“I know that there are norms. To be honest, I haven't really read them.”

“You can tell, I mean, you can tell if it's Figma Make or not, versus our own design system.”

“I have major concerns, especially having young kids, that they, you need to understand, you need to be able to think on your own. You need to be able to think on the fly and come up with your own ideas. And there's a time and a place for technology. There's a time and a place for. Sorry, I got to go back to plug it. But there's a time and a place for any sort of technology tool. It's just how you use it that is what's going to make or break you, I guess. I don't know. I think the same thing goes for the people who started their career, um, during covid. They never. Like, I spent the first four years of my IT and design career in an office where we had access to leadership, we had access to networking, we had real people to talk to. And now, it's one of those things where, feel like people need to be more cautious too. Like, I know, like interviewing skills.”

“Sorry, I think I'm, like, all over the board. So, I feel like there's an idea, there's an innovation piece to it. It can both fuel or hinder innovation. I think there's a security piece to it, where they still need to understand what you do and don't give to the internet. But then there's also, like, finding a job. Finding a job with AI tools right now is, like, insane. I have friends that are looking for work, and I have friends that, like, being on LinkedIn and figuring out, what's a real posting and what's not? How do you make your resume stand out with all of these tools? How do you know if somebody has two jobs? How do you know if someone, my husband does a lot of interviews, learning how to interview without somebody giving you the answer, you know? It's just learning, like, they don't know anything else and that's the problem. They need to be able to learn what are ways to still work without AI, but how do we use it to make the world better?”

“I used to be really resistant to it. I feel like, used in the right way, it's a benefit. I think it can expand on ideas that are already generated, but it still needs people to feed it. And I mean, I still don't know all of the ins and outs of it.”

“Like, I'm not going to pretend to know, but it can expand on ideas that are already generated. But we still need people to come up with new things, right, to feed the tools. What really scares me though is the ability to create images with AI and not knowing if they're real.”

“I don't know if it doesn't do this right now, but it would be really cool to have a tool created for learning and training that can adapt based on, like, for example, I really want to learn more about visual design. If Figma had an AI tool that I could interact with in real time and I can learn it, and it can give me real feedback of, "okay, the way that you did this isn't the most efficient way of doing it. [I'd want it to say] let me show you how to do it in real time," rather than having a one-on-one session with a person. I think that could help me in my career of learning design tools. I'm sure that there's other ways that it could help my life and my personal life, but I feel like in my day-to-day, figuring out how to be a more efficient designer would be, without having to pay thousands of dollars in an interactive one-on-one training, right?”

“I still gathered a lot of the information to feed into the tool. But I didn't also have to think of prompts on my own. In my personal life, I use it for many different things. I use it a lot for just bouncing ideas off of someone when I don't necessarily know the answer, or like getting, doing quick research. For example, we're trying to figure out a play set structure in the backyard, and being able to put in our plot plan and have it give the overall recommendation. But I think the first time I actually used it for my personal life was trying to figure out a recipe for dinner. I'm like, I have this at my house. I need it to be ready in 30 minutes. Like, what do I do? And it's been great. So, ever since then, my husband and I have used it for forecasting finances and stuff and retirement, and we can put in a bunch of different data points.”

“But I'm always. I feel like more people are disclosing, like, "this was created with AI" as a tagline, or "AI-generated image," or "made with the assistance of this tool." We have always been. The people on my team have always been encouraged of, you always disclose if this is something that you made in Figma Make. You can tell, I mean, you can tell if it's Figma Make or not, versus our own design system. I know that there are norms and there's integrity training classes around it and all that.”

“That was a big moment where I thought, oh well, yeah, this makes sense. Now I can actually see how I can use this to strategically iterate or tactically iterate different elements of it. The other part was when I actually hooked up Figma to Supabase, and was able to make this thing really work, rather than just building prototypes for 25 years. It's always been a game of, you know, "imagine if" and "don't go down this path" and all those different things where you're sort of emulating actual functionality. Here I was able to actually make it work and to save that information not just in the session but to persist over time, which allowed me to generate a whole bunch of fake data to actually store in the Supabase. That was a big moment, but probably even more so was the idea that I didn't have to learn how to configure that database. As I was telling Figma what I wanted it to do and making changes to the interface, it would say, "Okay, hold on. I need to go back and look at that database and either create a new handler for it, or I need to”

“change the way that this data is stored," because it will always assume the simplest thing. It will glom together five pieces of information into one item. But then when you say, "Well, actually, I want to use that information slightly differently," it will say, "Oh, I've got to take that big glob of information, break it up into five items. Hold on, let me go do that." And then it would make the changes in Supabase and round-trip those back to the interface. That was a sort of big moment for me, because I was like, well, I can get some of the functionality that I really want without necessarily having to go through and use a separate interface in order to try to describe what I need that database schema to be, which is really not my sweet spot. So the ability for the interface to infer what a database schema would be, and as I would imagine a whole bunch of other technical factors, from what I want the interface to be able to accomplish, and the functionality it has to support, was actually a big moment for me.”

“So, I think that there's a lot of hesitancy right now, because teams are trying to figure out a couple different things. One, how should their teams be using AI, whether it's for design or for research or for a myriad other things? And the efficiency that they get out of that and/or the cost that's associated with that, how does that impact how they want to structure their team, whether they want to work with agencies or not? I think that there's a lot of hesitancy there that's happening as they are trying to figure it out.”

“It's changing every day right now and there's a lot of hype around it as well. I was talking with a friend of mine who works for a company, and he said their company's going completely AI. Like, all their designers, all they're going to do is write specs. I was like, well, that makes sense in a lot of ways if you're doing additive features to an interface. It's a lot harder to spec out what an entire thing has to be. That gets really complicated really fast. That was actually one of the things I liked about Figma, and actually the thing that kind of changed a little bit. I'm a sort of a ground-up designer. I always think about what are the sort of building blocks, what is the data, what are the elements, and then build up the interface from there. Whereas I know a lot of designers really start with the first page and then they try to figure it out the other way.”

“Being ground up actually works really well with AI, because what it allows you to do is think, okay, well I'm going to create the end-result page, let's say, and then I can evolve toward the warehouse and the functionality that gets the user to some version of that page. In the process of doing so, you're actually creating data for whatever you're creating. His company says, "We're doing this by like June 1st." I was like, "Wow, that's really ambitious." And he's like, "Yeah." I was like, "Are you concerned, you know, not for your job, but about the quality of the output?" He says, "Yeah, of course we're concerned." But the interesting thing was, it's like, "We're using synthetic personas to validate it. We're doing synthetic user testing in order to test it. We're running QA programs against that." I'm like, "Well, you're doing it all within an AI.”

“Isn't there a concern of being completely disassociated from the actual reality of the user, and the fact that AI is checking its own work? Any blind spots that are built into, let's say, the synthetic personas, are going to persist throughout that process." He says, "It's a very real problem and we're aware of it, and we're going to try to tune it as we go through, but the theoretical cost savings, and time savings more than the cost savings, give us that 80/20 rule." I was like, "Well, good luck." It made me think that we're one big screw-up away from having a big expensive reality check in terms of what people are outputting, whether that's going to be security related, or user experience related, or transactional related in some way. So that was one perspective. In terms of what we're hearing from our clients, much more cautious in terms of how they're implementing it.”

“We've been advocating for the implementation of more AI onsite for people, like their own versions of LLMs. People are becoming habituated to using LLMs for product discovery, product comparison, things like that, and they get the idea, but I think how they would prepare their organizations for that, in order for it to be effective, their benchmarks for accuracy are much higher. So if you put anything on your site that's LLM oriented and it tells someone something that's wrong, well, if that happens in ChatGPT, ChatGPT is like, "Sorry," you know, you go validate it with the client. But if you're actually on the client site and let's say I want to validate that a package or a certain combination of products will work in a certain way and I have very detailed questions and it's giving me very detailed answers and that turns out to be wrong, then the repercussions of that are much higher. I think people are starting to come around to the idea that so much of their product discovery process is happening off-site, outside their control, and they only have indirect control of that.”

“Users are going and asking very detailed questions about our customers' products and trying to figure out what is the best product, what's the best version of the product. I always tell people, when people, it's a very hard process. No one likes to do it. It's no one's primary job to go and figure out what's this enterprise product that we have to implement across our organization, or even just for our department. It's always been a very hard thing that no one really likes, mostly because a lot of times getting the information has been very hard. Creating an apples-to-apples comparison is very hard, and LLMs are making that very easy. Now, whether it's doing it correctly or not, or doing it in your favor or not, is another question. But from the user standpoint, I suspect that people are asking very detailed questions that these companies don't have content to really support yet.”

“They're saying things like, "Look, I'm a midsize manufacturing company. We need a product that has this function, this function, this function. I want this type of licensing model." They are able to describe their problem. That's the only thing that they come into this process with at least some clarity about. The bridge has always been about trying to map their problem to your products, and to make it even harder, to map your product to other products and to be able to make that decision-making process feel accurate and complete. LLMs are helping with that tremendously. But in order for that to work, your company needs to actually be able to come up with super solutions, or synthetic solutions, that allow it to extrapolate correctly about how your product would work for the very specific situations that they are defining using LLM.”

“And it is a very interesting time, because it's not about creating a thousand solutions. It's about, how do you essentially break down your solutions into atomistic parts, so that the LLM can appropriately recombine them and then talk about them in a way that minimizes hallucination and extrapolation? Because that's what people are doing on LLM. The role of a lot of our clients', let's say, marketing website has shifted from, or probably will continue to shift even more so from, discovery to confirmation or validation. That is really changing the role of what a website is supposed to do, and what becomes important on that. Now you have to figure out, if you assume that someone is having an experience on LLM and will eventually come to your website, then you have to figure out, what's that graceful bridge? Like, what have they been set for? What, when they actually do hit your website, what do they need to know? What do they already know? Which is hard, because LLMs are a bit of a black box right now, right? So you don't know, you can only kind of guess based on where they entered into.”

“Yes. And all of our clients have noted that their organic SEO is just getting brutalized, because you're getting those Gemini answer overviews that are happening there, and a lot of people are shifting to an LLM and they're doing their discovery there. So the ability to precisely understand what people are [doing], and this is a problem, because all these companies have spent the last 10 years optimizing their SEO and they want to have the same type of inbound tracking that they've grown very accustomed to. Their ability to tune it and their ability to understand it, it feels like we're right back to the very beginning of Google organic search and Google AdWords, where people were trying to game or guess the algorithm. That's where we are right now with LLM. All the strategy around inbound LLM is basically, "How do I game it? How do I optimize for it?”

“So I'm most likely to be cited, my answers are accurate, I have a large share of voice," all these different things. But at the end of the day, you have almost zero visibility into that. All the tools that are springing up right now, like Profound and Semrush and things like that, they're trying to mimic that sense of control, but it's really not, because, like, Profound is basically taking the 10 quote-unquote most likely answers, or most likely questions, that people have, and hitting those LLMs again and again and trying to say, "Well, this is what it's most likely saying." But there's no guarantee that that's actually what it's saying, or what people are engaging with. Never mind the fact that, the ability to model and understand what the structure of the entire conversation looks like, that's another thing. When you talk to your clients and they're like, "Oh well, someone says, 'Show me the top five competitor companies that do X,'" and they pop up, they're like, "Well, that's probably good enough." You're like, "Well, that's really just the first question of what is likely at least a five- to ten-point of engagement. And where does that end up? Where does that conversation end up?" That is a big thing for our customers, our clients, trying to understand: how does LLM fit into the overall customer journey? How is the customer journey being changed by this? Then what do they need to do in terms of optimizing their website to really do the things that LLMs can't do very well? When someone is coming in, they can pick up that baton. The top part of that customer journey, the product discovery part of the journey, is being compressed and happening elsewhere. But the other parts of that customer journey, which is, not the discovery, not even the high-level consideration, but the "okay, let's get into it" type of part of stuff, that is still critically important for these websites to be able to do. But the pathways to that, they don't have the information about what does that maturation look like? What are people ready for? How should we, like, we don't want to push that stuff too far, because there is going to be a certain portion of people who are still like, "Now, what are you all about?”

“For our clients right now there is uncertainty, and even if they kind of think, "Well, this is probably where it's going to go," it's going to be expensive to get there. I mean, you're talking about optimizing all of your knowledge-based articles, you're talking about optimizing all this data that is buried down in there. You have to make sure it gets indexed, you have to make sure it's talking about it correctly, you have to make sure it's updated, because LLMs won't look at date stamps. You and I will look at a knowledge-based article and be like, "Well, that's four years old. I don't know if that's really true anymore." But if an LLM just goes and pulls that in and uses that as a basis of a response, then there's a real danger there.”

“That's one of the other things, AI is a very good copycat. It's very good at giving you something that you think, based on what everyone else is doing. But if the thing that you're doing is not something that really exists elsewhere or is sufficiently different, then, it can still be a very good tactical execution tool. You can give it a task saying, "Okay, I need you to come up with some ideas about that." But it's not like you can just say, "Here's a marketing website," and what it's going to do is generate that. So I don't know if we've had any real failures with it yet. I think we're still trying to figure out exactly the best ways to use it in a way that still leverages what we are good at as an agency, and promotes that difference to our clients to make ourselves still relevant and useful. I do think research is one of those, honestly. Research is one of those things that goes in and out of favor a lot.”

“Yes, and the ability to, I mean, one of the nice things about it is that we've always had this qual, right? With this, potentially there's the idea that you can scale qual a little bit more, and still make it so, instead of doing 20 sessions, you can do 50 sessions. The key is not just to have a transcript and dump it in there and be like, "Tell me what it says." The key is being able to ask very, very cogent questions in that, and then be able to do pattern analysis across it. But it's going to come down to the quality of the questions, because I've been doing a lot of comparison of, "Well, what would be the things I recommend about changing on a website versus what AI is telling me?" There is definitely some overlap for sure, but the areas of overlap is, AI is good at what is best practices it's found someplace else.”

“Those are fine, but there's a lot of things about the actual particularities of the interface or the use case that it's not quite so good at. You can try to get there by being very specific with the LLM, but it's still drawing upon a probabilistic data set of what is the most likely right answer based on the preponderance of evidence, and you have no idea where that evidence comes from. So controlling the evidence, right?”

“Yeah. And I think, the augmentation, the one thing about AI, it's very good at looking like it has really good specific and general knowledge, right? But it doesn't. Like you said, it's a probabilistic engine that is looking for what is most likely the next right word to put together. It's very good at seeming like intelligence, but really at the end of the day it's not. All it's giving you is, "This is what basically everyone else is saying." If you have tasks which are sort of wisdoms-of-the-crowds-oriented, then it works really well. But if you have tasks that are not based on that, that are more individualistic or unique, then it's not very good at that. The question is, a lot of people don't understand the difference between those two things.”

“Yeah. I think at the end of the day, we've all seen some big examples, like that McKinsey report, where they charged like $100,000 and it turned out it was all AI slop. The ability for a human being to go through and discern whether something is correct or incorrect, and then be able to go back to the data set that is built on, when it comes to being able to trust your own evidence, your own sources, your own starting points, and being able to look at it and run your own analysis on it. You can tell an LLM, "Give me all the citations which you're drawing from," and it's going to give you a handful of those. It's not going to give you all of them. And even then, now I'm going to have to go through someone else's data and try to figure out whether what they actually said and whether the extrapolation was correct. That's a problem, because, now, what time is being saved here?”

“I wonder if it'll be, but then at that point I'm sort of working against what everyone thinks the efficiencies of the LLM are. Now I'm sort of doing more machine learning in some way, and I'm still relying upon the LLM's ability to interpret that into an interface that it cannot see. This is the thing that most people don't realize, is that LLMs, when you say, "Hey, go look at this website," it doesn't read an interface the same way a human being does. This comes across oftentimes when you say, "Hey, how well is this page designed according to this criteria?" and it will be like, "Check, check, check, check, check." Then you go and you look at the interface and you're like, you understand that the LLM doesn't digest or read an interface with the same variability or weaknesses as a human. So the issues of prioritization and visibility and obscurity, like, "Well, it exists on the page." You're like, "Well, but does it exist in the right spot on the page in a way that someone's going to see it, or in the way that human beings associate proximity with relative relationships," all these different factors that go into how humans actually do it. Now, if you're asking an LLM to create an interface that another machine can read, yeah, it's going to kick ass doing that. That's why I think everyone is very excited about agentic, where agents are going to be talking to agents, and humans are going to be taken out of that, except as a completely confirmation type of role. But in terms of interfaces that people use, it's important to understand that human beings digest information very differently, and LLMs do a very good job of obscuring that fact. When you ask them, you and I, I've been going back and forth with Claude about this and I've been like, "All the ways in which you perceive an interface are very different from the ways that I perceive an interface, and there are, there seem to be, hidden obstacles in that process." It will tell you, "Yes, you're absolutely right. I'm looking at in terms of a markdown. I'm looking at in terms of, what if there's a schema behind it." All these things that are completely invisible to the user, and I'm making value judgments based on that. Now, from a research standpoint, does that hurt it when it comes to a design standpoint? Probably not so much. But again, what it's going to do is, it's going to look at examples out there that it thinks, "Hey, everyone's doing it this way. This is the right answer.”

“People whose jobs were built upon being a storehouse and guardian of knowledge, they got destroyed, like, when you talk about a travel agent and things like that. Because people didn't have access to the information, and the travel agent had the ability to piece together, hold and guard, that information, and then piece that information together for you. In some ways, that's some of what our job is, when we talk about UX, or when we talk about design. We have an embedded expertise about certain things.”

“So that is a concern that makes me, as a 50-something-year-old guy who's been working in technology, like, is that going to be obliterated?”

“Theoretically as a good design strategist, that opens up doors for me to actually do execution that I wouldn't be able to do normally, Like being able to connect a prototype to Supabase, which three years ago we could have, but it would have been a lot of diving deep into the... A lot of back and forth, and involving a lot more people. Whereas now I can take the concept much further into that process. It's interesting because we've been having conversations like, we're back to the whole sort of unicorn thing, right? Every time a new technology comes out, everyone's like, "Oh well, it's just going to take one guy, and my company's looking for the person who can do it from stakeholder interviews, through research, through design, all the way to coding, and then just hand it off to like a DevOps person who's just going to make it work." That can work, theoretically, but I think the other side of the coin, that people tend to not really appreciate, is that a large part of the process that we do is not just executing a design but socializing designs within organizations for the purpose of decision-making and collaboration. That process, as much as you automate it, or make it AI assisted, it still requires a certain skill set that is more human-based than anything else. A big part of my job is, working with the client, "Okay, so what are we trying to achieve out of this?" If we do some research, being able to say what are the most important or germane parts of that research, and how do we flow that into design? And then, "Okay, here's some overall concepts.”

“With the project that we did, one of the things that we found doing this sort of vibe coding that was going on, is, actually, it was still super useful to do high-level flows and functionality, because once you, if you just try to jump in and start coding it, the complexity gets to you really quickly. You can recover from it, sure. It's not like you're going to go, "Oh my God, I can't do it." But it makes a lot more sense to think through the entire experience of what you're trying to do for it, and then to use AI to execute either on a screen level or on a functionality level.”

“Yes. The LLMs suffer from the same problem on a coding level, is that it starts to iterate out code based on assumptions that were created earlier in the process, before you actually were able to describe the overall experience. So now it's working backwards and trying to figure it and fix it... Yes, you can go back to Claude Code and like, "Okay, so now this thing is done. I want you to go through and I want you to optimize all the code, I want you to optimize the database, I want you to look at it for security holes." It can do that, but the question is, is your prototype full enough now? It's gone down these, you know, it's connected 17 different rabbit holes. Can it still step back and say, "Okay, this is how we should think about this holistically, not just from a stylesheet level or anything like that, but from a sort of overall functional level?”

“For me, when I look at it and what is my potential role in this, like, if I was a coder, I'd be terrified, right? Because I'm not a person who can look at that and be able to verify where their code is. But I know that for a lot of entry-level jobs, and I know there's been a lot of talk about this, it's not about cost savings. It's about building the next generation of people who can be the senior developers who are going to look at this and be able to do it. The same thing is going to happen with design. The same thing is going to happen with research. People are going to have very short-term thinking about it. You're going to lose the ability to generate the people who are going to be necessary in order to do the overall evaluation of whether this thing is working correctly or not.”

“At the end of the day, my biggest concern, my biggest fear, is, when you build a very complex interface, is that you completely miss edge cases, right? And not, like, extreme edge cases, but just non-obvious use cases. That causes a really big problem in the interface. It's not necessarily a bug, but a certain way of a person using the interface is not going to be supported, or a certain path, whether they take, do, they're going to dead-end, or they're going to lose their data. They're going to do all these different things. That is really one of my concerns about how this thing is, when you start to, when you have a product manager who thinks, "I don't need designers, I don't even need engineers. I'm just going to spec it all out and feed it in here, and then I'm going to look at it not with the critical eye that really is necessary, but just from a product manager perspective, and like, it works, and then push it to production." And then it turns out it doesn't work because there was no critical expertise in terms of understanding exactly how things work, or what that process should look like.”

“But when I was doing it, as someone who was very excited that I could actually put together a live prototype, it wasn't so much that I was replacing our information designer or our visual designer. It was the fact that the things that I needed this interface to be able to do were very hard to communicate in terms of requirements or in terms of business logic, or anything like that. You were able to visualize that very easily, and to make this artifact something that incorporated that information in a way that was much easier to understand. So you don't have the risk of a designer not reading a note about how something should work, because it actually works that way. One of the things that we talked about was, push, as we're doing all these different things, that becomes the artifact that we push through the pipeline. We can do a very high-level diagram of what it looks like, and then we can visualize that in a functional prototype in one way or another. But then the information designer could go in and actually change all the screens, and even the functionality there, but still understand what it's supposed to do. And then we pass it off to visual designer. For me, this prototype as being a warehouse of project knowledge was excellent. We toyed with the idea of annotating it, just having it so, like, as a rule, it's like throwing up the business logic so that anyone can see it as it's happening, and to bring that all back to the idea is that, I never viewed this as an opportunity to supplant the other people in my team or doing that process, but it allowed me to get them an artifact that was much richer and much more effective, and potentially to share that with our clients. Because clients notoriously have a very hard time, you know, you can show them 10 different screens and walk them through how they're all going to work together, but they're not professionals. They don't see it that way. So there's always a risk there, that their assumptions are coming into play, or their lack of ability to understand what you're actually telling them, and what they're agreeing to. So doing that in that way, I did view it as a way of saying, it's a way for me to extend, not my skill set per se, but to visualize what I do in a way that is more effective. I don't know whether everyone else is going to see it that way, whether, or even whether a client will see it that way, but I view it that way. I am not a visual designer. I'm a pretty good information designer. But my value to our projects is not that. My value is being able to look at the whole thing and say, "Is it really doing what we needed to do? Here's an area, or here's a way that we might approach that type of problem," and letting other people solve those problems.”

“So, I think the biggest fear is replacement, or the idea that what I do is no longer [valued] and the knowledge I hold and the experience I have is not nearly as valuable anymore. I look at what happened when the internet first came along. People whose jobs were built upon being a storehouse and guardian of knowledge, they got destroyed, like, when you talk about a travel agent and things like that. Because people didn't have access to the information, and the travel agent had the ability to piece together, hold and guard, that information, and then piece that information together for you. In some ways, that's some of what our job is, when we talk about UX, or when we talk about design. We have an embedded expertise about certain things.”

“So my concern is that, whether it's true or not, the perception of customers or clients would be that all that just exists in the LLM already. So, "I don't need your personal expertise about it." I don't know where that's going to shake out, I honestly don't. So that is a concern that makes me, as a 50-something-year-old guy who's been working in technology, like, is that going to be obliterated? On the other side of it, having worked through some prototypes and things like that, I definitely do see the advantages of speed of execution. As someone whose role is primarily a strategist, I can actually see advantages to me, because I think about it in terms of inputs and research, and putting it all together, and then I do a certain level of design, and then I pass it off to someone else.”

“Yeah. Most of my day has changed massively because of AI. The university I'm at right now is really trying to implement AI into more of our practices. They're trying to pick up on it. We are held to Google Gemini because that's what our university has a contract with. However, I do use ChatGPT to write emails. I work on the institutional review board, so I'm looking at protocol proposals, research proposals every day, and I have to require revisions and whatnot. In the past, what I would have done is just write these revisions myself, but instead I'll type it into ChatGPT and just have it feed me back a way to word it, which honestly cuts off a significant amount of time, because I remember spending so much time on just formatting emails.”

“And now it's like maybe five, not even five, minutes. Like a couple of minutes. And then also, anything that has to do with creating spreadsheets, I really use AI a lot. And I'll ask it for second opinions, like when it comes to research determinations: is this study exempt? Is it a limited review? I'll ask it for second opinions. It's not so good at that, but at least I get a second opinion to bounce off of.”

“It's complicated, because in the university context there's a lot of regulations and compliance we have to abide by. So it was a huge decision. It was multi-partal. The president of the university had to be behind it as well. So we have what's called the Innovate Academy, which is really encouraged for people in my department to take and do.”

“Thank you. Yeah. I use OneNote every day. NotebookLM. Yeah, that's what it is. And I know they use that a lot and are trying to implement that into day-to-day, but you do it after you take the academy. So what's kind of more open source, so to speak, at [university] is, because Google Gemini reads your screen, right? So they're encouraging people to utilize this in any bit of our systems. It's not necessarily structured on how we use AI at this point. I think there are big plans for administration to implement AI, but they don't know exactly how to, without just saying it'll make processes faster. And we are trying to implement it in our intake process for protocols, granted that takes a lot of weight from OIT, which we don't have the FTE for. So it's a little bit hard, and it's a little bit piecemeal. Right now, I'm trying to get people to use it as a transcriber rather than taking notes themselves. Very simple things.”

“They really are, because of how many regulations that they have. So any bot we use or any agent we use can't reuse the information to train the LLM. So it's like, yeah, we have Gemini, that's great, but because of privacy standards, we can't train the LLM better. So you're just kind of, it's like being a new user each time, and that sucks when you're using AI. That's why I love ChatGPT, because it's like my best friend. It knows everything about me. But with [university] systems, unfortunately, we just can't have that quality of training because of HIPAA compliance. There's just many different aspects.”

“It's general time-saving. It's so silly. I feel so dependent on it. But if I need to ask someone a question, I will type it into ChatGPT first and then have it reword something, because I'm a very direct communicator and sometimes that comes off very strongly in emails. Sometimes I get vague, like I'm too vague. I've noticed there's just so much less miscommunication when I'm having that third party rewrite these for me, because there isn't personal opinion. There is no concern over "oh, I'm worried what they're going to think." It's just a third party without that emotional additive.”

“We have so many human subjects research determinations at [university] because of the type of research that happens here. And our chat bots are just not good at that. They dictate everything as limited review, which is not like it sounds. It's a small review, but it actually contains the whole committee and everything, and that's incorrect. It's filling in gaps where it doesn't need to. At [university] we can't train the model, so we can't get it really fine-tuned to what our determinations actually are.”

“Yeah, I think it's actually pretty taboo to say that AI helped. That's a great question, because that's the interesting dichotomy that's happening. We have administrators, we have higher ups saying let's use AI, let's integrate this, and then there's still this taboo of like, yeah, AI helped me write this email that's giving these really high directives, or this newsletter that goes out to the university. Instead of bragging about how, I think it's really impressive to be able to write strong prompts to a chatbot and give it these guardrails, so to speak. I think that should be on a resume, as a matter of fact. But people are so resistant to saying and giving the idea that someone else did this work for me. Especially in academia, when elitism is really strong, and it's an intellectual elitism. The idea of somebody else doing your work is really taboo. And I think my previous institution handled it really well. When ChatGPT was becoming a household name, they sent out a newsletter and bragged, like, "this was written by ChatGPT, look what we can do." And I thought that was a cool way to do it, but there's still so much resistance.”

“I spent 10 years working in neuroscience. And so, just understanding the development of neural pathways, I know for a fact we are weakening those neural pathways by shortening the process. Like, learning how to ride a bike, you don't forget, because it requires so much motor skill and functioning that that pathway never gets weakened. I mean, it can get weakened, so you're unsteady on the bike, but you still know how to ride it at the end of the day, because it requires so much from your body in each piece. So when you're taking all these complex tasks and shortening them down to just asking one question, you're shortening that path. I just know it's happening. So yeah, I am personally concerned about that. And I think people in the field of neuroscience are really concerned about it.”

“Oh god. There's a lot of things that I say I'm going to continue doing the hard way and then I don't, because I'm short on time. I really try to continue designing, because I just redid our research integrity websites and I really try to continue brainstorming design on pen and paper. Like, starting my initial outline on pen and paper, and then maybe having a discussion with ChatGPT about how the information should go in. And even then, I still feel a little weird, because I don't want it to weaken that creativity or those skill sets. I'm sure there's other things too, but time management really is the key, and that forces me to continue using it.”

“Like I'm going crazy. So I'll explain why. Because I do contract work as a UX researcher. And right now I'm just running interviews for a company. Basically they're developing a niche AI chatbot for companies. The companies come to them, give them briefs of like "this is what we want to know about this market," and then we interview them, and then we feed the LLM all that information, that really niche information, and then we provide that chatbot for whatever company came to us. And so a lot of the times I'm doing interviews about the development of agentic AI and vector databases. It's like AI agents talking to AI agents. And I just start to feel like I'm going crazy because it's very Matrix-y, and then I realize when I'm emailing people, I'm like, man, it's just two AI bots talking to each other at this point.”

“And that feels, it's just like, this... I can imagine this is what my parents felt like during the discovery of the internet. Because it just feels like there's this whole world being created that's not real. And yeah, I don't know how to... I think about this a lot, but it's hard to explain.”

“In my previous job I had a few direct reports, and they were always fresh grads. This last round, like 20 to 22, was the age range. And I could see every email I was getting was written by AI.”

“So that's what I will say the university gave me. Out of everything, that is what undergraduate gave to me: the ability to critically think and question, even if it was cycles my family goes through or just the world around me in my working day. It gives you the ability to critically think. But if we integrate so much AI and our critical thinking skills are leaned on, like, okay, I asked this question, let me just go check with whatever chatbot. I wonder, when does that critical thinking get diminished?”

“And that's what I worried about with my previous employees. Are they using critical thinking when it comes to patients? Like, how often are they turning to chatbots for things that they really need to think about, rather than just these minimal tasks that are fine to do?”

“Oh god. There's a lot of things that I say I'm going to continue doing the hard way and then I don't, because I'm short on time. I really try to continue designing, because I just redid our research integrity websites and I really try to continue brainstorming design on pen and paper. Like, starting my initial outline on pen and paper, and then maybe having a discussion with ChatGPT about how the information should go in. And even then, I still feel a little weird, because I don't want it to weaken that creativity or those skill sets. I'm sure there's other things too, but time management really is the key, and that forces me to continue using it.”

“In my previous job I had a few direct reports, and they were always fresh grads. This last round, like 20 to 22, was the age range. And I could see every email I was getting was written by AI. I mean, no filter. Just em dashes and weird bolding, you know, just that weird overvalidating language.”