Design Addresses Urgent Organizational Challenges in Age of AI, According to New Report

Amidst belt-tightening across various sectors, as well as the accelerated advancement of artificial intelligence, organizations face new and urgent challenges.

How to proceed in this era of ambiguity and uncertainty? It’s the kind of challenge design was made for, according to ID’s 2024 report.

The report, titled Taking Responsibility in the Age of AI, identifies five urgent challenges organizations face today, and demonstrates how design is prepared and positioned to lead organizations through these challenges.

The report’s findings were based on extensive interviews with 29 design and business professionals who are currently working at large, high-profile organizations such as Ford, IBM, IDEO, Microsoft, and JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Mark Jones led the team of ID graduate students who conducted the interviews and created the report.

“Despite the death knell sounded in some corners, design is more urgently needed than ever. With the evolution of AI happening now, the risks are higher than ever. If new product launches, new services, and new systems are based purely on notions of efficiency, we will see biases, inequities, and unintended consequences mount like never before.”

The top challenges that the report highlighted, as well as how designers can take responsibility in this critical moment and address those challenges, include:

1. The need to work at speed. Professionals interviewed for the report pointed out that designers can help companies focus on the most relevant needs or problems faster, and not waste time on subpar products. Methods such as prototyping can reveal strengths or faults in products long before they are otherwise discovered.
2. The need for systems thinkers who focus on multi-stakeholder environments with multiple variables, with knowledge of how those variables interact. Jones offered an example, explaining how “making change in struggling neighborhoods isn’t just one thing. It’s food and housing and transportation and childcare, so that becomes a system. You have to think about the entire system and look at how things are related.” Strategic designers, Jones says, consider systems when exploring solutions.
3. The need for facilitators. Collaboration, and the ability to relate tangible evidence from a single stakeholder to other stakeholders, is key to corporate efficiency. The report notes that designers are practiced in taking a “holistic, big-picture view and translating complex information and insights across disciplines and departments—without losing key details.”
4. The need for new metrics. Interviewees highlighted that brand behaviors that relate to things such as sustainability, inclusion, and social justice matter deeply to consumers, and such opinions aren’t always captured in existing business/outcome metrics. They suggested that new metrics should balance the qualitative and quantitative—a common practice among designers.
5. The need to demonstrate values. Relating to the previous challenge, the report highlights a need for organizations to outwardly display their commitment to social responsibility through sustainability and representation.

The Taking Responsibility in the Age of AI report was also the subject of a robust online public panel discussion on June 4 that featured several top design executives, including Katrina Alcorn, managing director of design and digital products in North America for the creative group Accenture Song; Kevin Bethune, founder and chief creative officer of the design firm Dreams × Design + Life; and Robert Fabricant, co-founder and partner of the design practice Dalberg Design.

The participants offered their perspectives on design in a world where AI is becoming more prevalent.

Alcorn added, “We need to lean on skills [centered] around facilitation, listening—the unique skills we teach designers. I do not see machines replacing humans any time soon for that type of work.”

Speaking specifically to AI, Fabricant said that corporations should be concerned about these technologies “becoming proxies for choices around who matters, what problems matter, what we do and don’t know about people. What’s missing might be significant, but it’s a fairly bespoke experience to find out what’s missing. What could this data be suppressing? It’s actually quite hard [to find out].”

The 2024 report is a follow-up to a prior report by ID, titled Lead with Purpose. Released in 2020, that report utilized a similar methodology in which 50 executives were interviewed about the functional role that design could play in achieving business and organizational success.­

ID is slated to offer a new institutional report in 2026. Those interested in partnering, participating, and/or finding strategic designers who can lead them through urgent organizational challenges, should contact Peter Zapf, director of partnerships and strategic initiatives at ID.

“Technology seems to be outpacing our ability to harness it effectively—but design professionals are uniquely qualified to take responsibility and lead today’s most important organizations to success,” says Anijo Mathew, dean at the Institute of Design.