#51 Capitalism Will Save Your Design Career (Eventually)

– It’s been almost three years now... Long enough for a "temporary" downturn to start feeling permanent...

Last week, I sat down with an entrepreneur I’ve known for a while. He’d just had to shut down part of his digital agency. We talked about where we are, how we got here, and what might come next. He wasn't just worried about his business. He was worried about the people he'd had to let go.

I’m not an oracle. I told him that too. Still, I left that conversation more convinced than ever that this will change.

The triple whammy

People working in digital product design were hit from three directions at once. I wrote about this in June 2024. The broad picture was right. But I was too optimistic about how quickly things would improve.

This downturn came after an unusual high. During COVID, digital products and services boomed, money was cheap, and teams grew fast.

Then companies pivoted almost overnight, from growth to profits. Most designers, researchers, and product people work on the forward edge. New products and services. Not maintenance or incremental optimization of what already exists. So when the knife comes out, that work is often first to go.

And then there's AI. Or more precisely, the promise of AI. The idea that large parts of knowledge work could soon be done with far fewer people spread quickly through boardrooms and investor calls. Whether those savings were realistic became secondary. Expectations were set and cuts followed.

And that is more or less where we’ve been since then.

The numbers don’t add up

The cuts happening across the industry are happening because investors and shareholders expect profit growth, and AI has been sold to them as the mechanism. Cut the headcount, automate, watch the margins improve.

The reality is more complicated. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research published in February of 2026 surveyed 6,000 CEOs and senior executives across the US, UK, Germany, and Australia. The vast majority reported little impact from AI on their operations so far. A separate MIT report from August 2025 found that most AI implementations fail to contribute to profits, due to brittle workflows and poor fit with how organizations actually function. McKinsey, Accenture, and others are now running full-speed AI transformation programs to help companies close that gap. This will accelerate the change, but there's a ceiling nobody can see yet, and the gap between what was promised and what will be delivered will remain wide.

The AI companies' own numbers make the same point from a different angle. OpenAI is targeting a valuation of up to $1 trillion while not expecting to turn cash-flow positive until around 2030. Goldman Sachs projects the entire SaaS market at $780 billion by 2030. Every vendor, every product, every geography combined. OpenAI alone is targeting $280 billion of that. It simply doesn't add up.

Once enough powerful people believe something, it becomes a truth. At least until reality catches up. The AI efficiency programmes will run their course. But the companies that wait until they're done before thinking about growth are making a strategic mistake. The window for differentiation is open right now.

The only other option

At some point, there's nothing meaningful left to cut. Productivity improvements can buy you some time, and that's exactly what the AI efficiency programs are promising. But they have a ceiling. Once you've captured most of the available gains, only one lever remains. Revenue growth. And in a competitive market, growth requires differentiation.

Differentiation requires understanding your customers and users better than your competitors do. That means research. That means strategy. That means design. The skills that have been cut are exactly the skills that growth depends on.

LLM-powered tools are genuinely changing how the work is done. Research prep, prototype generation, automated design systems... more ideas tried, more experiments validated, (reasonably) consistent hi-res user interfaces, faster. But speed is not the same as better outcomes. I've written about this before. In research, for example, just prompting an LLM gets you from below average to average. It gives you the default answer, the most documented behavior, the baseline assumptions that everyone in your industry already shares. If your competitors are using the same tools, trained on the same data, you'll all arrive at roughly the same place.

The things that make customers choose you, and stay, are the delighters. The insights nobody else has, or realized how important they were, because nobody else did the real research. The unmet need that only surfaces when you're actually in the room with people, watching what they do rather than just listening to what they say. That work cannot be prompted.

Will "design" be the same as before? No. Fewer designers will be needed, some tasks will be redundant, and some skills will matter less. But the designers who combine genuine strategy and research skills with fluency in the updated processes and new tools will be exactly the people everyone is competing for.

The future is already here

The recovery won't arrive everywhere at once. At Ambition we kept growing last year (knock on wood), while some of our industry peers were struggling. Not because we're smarter, but because we happened to be positioned in the right part of the market at the right time. For designers and researchers looking for work, that same logic applies. Not every company is cutting. Some are hiring right now, quietly and deliberately, building the capability everyone else eventually will be scrambling for.

The entrepreneur? I didn't give him a timeline. I still can't.

What I do know is this. This is not permanent. It will turn. Not because things are about to get easier, but because the alternative, endless cost-cutting in a stagnant market, is not a strategy anyone can sustain. The companies that understand that are already moving. The rest will follow.

Capitalism, greed, and unrealistic expectations created this mess. Sooner or later the same forces will clean it up.

Like it or not, that's just the way the system works.