Notes From a Designers’ Panel: What AI Really Means for Creative Work

About 2 weeks ago, I sat on a panel with my colleagues in the Interswitch Design team. It was a room of about 40 designers. Brand designers, product designers, motion designers, researchers, design engineers; every flavour of creative you could think of. On the panel session with me were a researcher, a brand designer, a product designer and a design engineer, and the conversation was about one thing: what AI means for us as creatives.

What stood out for me wasn’t the diverse views and opinions we shared. It was how differently each person had quietly integrated AI into their day-to-day activities. Some of us used it for research, some for production work, some for nothing more than rubber-ducking ideas at midnight. But everyone, without exception, had found a way to work with it.

That’s the framing I want to start with.

The “Work with it” principle

In a podcast I was listening to recently, Mo Gawdat made a point that has been rattling around my head ever since: as a human, there’s no point trying to compete with a super-intelligent computer. You won’t win. The only sensible move is to work with it. And you do not have to be the most intelligent person in the room to make an impact, you just have to know how to work with the tools that are.”

For creatives, this hits especially hard. The instinct is either to dismiss AI as a gimmick or to fear it as a replacement. Both reactions miss the more useful frame, which is that AI is a bridge between ideation and execution. It doesn’t have to replace creativity. It can accelerate the parts that have always been bottlenecks, tedious research, creative production, and scaling creative works while we hold on to the parts that actually make creative work meaningful: the blank canvas, the storytelling, and the judgment calls.

On the panel, we walked through five areas where this is already showing up.

What we covered in the panel session

Research & Ideation. Every creative process starts with either a blank canvas or a pile of chaotic ideas, and both demand research. AI compresses what used to take days of digging into a few hours. Beyond speed, it also helps with the harder parts of a brief; distilling tone of voice, identifying emotional messaging, surfacing patterns you might have missed.

Visualization & Inspiration. Finding the right reference image has always been frustrating for creatives that rely on this resource for their work. The character is right but the pose is wrong. The pose is right but the attire is off. The mood is there but the lighting kills it. AI tools have made this dramatically less painful. They also help with layout; a place a lot of designers get stuck, defaulting to familiar structures because trying something new takes time none of us have. AI can suggest visual directions and presentation approaches that might have taken you a bit longer to arrive at.

Bridging Creative Gaps. Collaboration is a huge part of creative work, and AI has made it easier in ways that aren’t obvious until you’ve used them. Generating quick mockups to align stakeholders, translating between disciplines (a designer explaining intent to an engineer, or vice versa), drafting copy that a writer can refine, these processes used to require either more time or more people than is necessary.

Audio & Video Production. This is where democratization is loudest. Voiceovers without a booth. Quick background music for ideations without licensing headaches. Video editing assistance, automatic subtitling, accurate transcription that does not require the creative to sit and write out what they hear . Formats that used to require a budget and a team are now accessible to a designer working solo on a Saturday.

Content Scaling & Delivery. A single idea now stretches further. One piece of long-form content can be repurposed into a thread, a carousel, a short video, a newsletter, in a short time and without losing the through-line. AI helps with the variations, the localisation, the A/B testing, and the brand consistency that used to require a much larger production team.

The pivot that stuck with me

That’s the panel recap. But sitting with the conversation afterward, three gains stood out as the ones every creative person should care about. Not because the others don’t matter, but because these are the ones that shift how you work, not just how fast you work.

1. Developing Ideas

AI can generate ideas of varying quality, but coming up with ideas was never really our problem. Creatives usually start with at least a kernel, a hunch, a fragment, a feeling. The real question is how to develop it.

Traditionally, we do this either alone with a notebook, sketchpad, or voice recorder, or in dialogue with a trusted friend or collaborator. AI gives us a third option, and it has two advantages over most people you know: it’s available at 3 a.m. when an idea strikes, and it has instant working knowledge across most domains.

It won’t get every fact right, you’ll need to verify rigorously later, but for the early stage, when you’re just trying to figure out if an idea has legs, its overview is usually good enough to explore the shape of it. The conversation itself becomes part of the development.

2. Doing the Previously Impossible

Artists have always used new technology to extend what their medium can do. The ancient Greeks built stage machinery so gods could descend from the heavens. In the 1920s, the development of high-quality microphones produced an entirely new vocal performance style, the crooners, who used the intimacy of the mic to sing in a way that wasn’t possible before.

AI sits in this lineage. It opens up moves that were previously out of reach for a solo creative, or even a small team. A designer can now produce a short animated film. A brand designer can generate a fully voiced explainer. A researcher can build interactive prototypes without writing a line of code. The ceiling on what one person can ship has moved, and it’s still moving.

3. Feedback and Revision

This is the “good to great” of creative work. Small errors — a typography slip, a spacing inconsistency, a misaligned detail — are easy for a creative to miss, and they’re often exactly the things that separate work that’s pretty good from work that genuinely stands out. The difference between good and great is almost always our attention to the little details. AI can come at your work with fresh eyes and surface what you’ve stopped seeing, giving you the chance to push the result further.

And it goes beyond catching errors. AI changes the economics of feedback itself… Getting a fresh perspective used to mean finding the right person, catching them at the right time, and hoping they’d engage seriously. Now you can stress-test a draft, get critique against a specific framework, or compare your work to standards in any reference space instantly, repeatedly, without burning anyone’s goodwill. It even makes revision enjoyable, which might be the most unexpected thing about it.

Mo Gawdat was right. There’s no win in trying to outpace something that processes faster than you, knows more than you, and doesn’t sleep. But there’s a massive win in working alongside it; letting it absorb the tedious and the repetitive, while you focus on the parts of the work that only you can do. As I told a fellow designer yesterday, with AI there is no longer an excuse for a shabby or less than excellent work.

The panel reminded me that no two creatives are integrating AI the same way. And honestly, that’s the point. The tool is broad enough that what you do with it becomes a creative decision in itself.