Thanksgiving Resilience

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Today, in 5 Minutes or Less ⏱️

You will learn two essential AI strategies that top design leaders use to secure their team's value, drive business efficiency, and navigate the current wave of tech layoffs.

Did You Know 🔎 

Intense contraction and strategic realignment in the tech industry in the US have led to significant ongoing layoffs in the tech sector, according to the official count.

• 2024 = 95,667 layoffs

• 2025 = 206,102 layoffs

• 2026 = Continued volatility. 58% of US business leaders  anticipate more layoffs driven by a permanent shift in staffing needs. AI is the Force Multiplier: 37% of companies expect to replace roles with AI by the end of 2026. 

According to an HBR report, half of a skill's value is lost within 2.5 years. This demands a new skill set to remain relevant, making continuous strategic evolution a prerequisite for survival during periods of organizational upheaval.

The data underscores that if you work in tech as a design leader, your priority for the next year is radical reinvention of how you define, communicate, and execute your work to maximize your value in an AI-driven, data-driven, speed-to-market-obsessed environment.

The Steps You Can Take to Navigate Org. Change with AI

The holiday season, starting around Thanksgiving, is when executive teams finalize next year's budgets, headcount, and often, the inevitable cost-cutting layoffs. This "scorched earth" corporate thinking—designed to hit short-term quarterly targets by shifting salaries from laid-off staff to top performers—is a reality I've seen play out at Apple, Yahoo, and Meta.

To insulate your team and make an undeniable business case for their continued existence, here are two core AI strategies you can adopt to keep your design function intact.

Integrate AI to Enhance Design Efficiency and Scale

To demonstrate efficiency in your organization, integrate AI tools to accelerate, improve, and scale design output. For example:

• Automate Tedious Tasks: Implement AI tools (like generative AI for rough drafts or predictive tools) to automate repetitive, low-value tasks (e.g., basic layout variations, repetitive image resizing, or generating design spec documentation). This frees up designers to focus on complex problem-solving and strategic thinking.

• Create AI-Powered Design Systems: Use AI to make the design system smarter. This could involve using AI to automatically audit accessibility compliance, predict optimal component usage based on context, or quickly generate localized variations of UI elements, ensuring consistency and reducing manual effort across the entire product suite.

• Accelerate Prototyping and Testing: Leverage AI to quickly generate diverse prototypes and simulate user behavior at scale, significantly reducing the time spent on manual A/B testing setup and analysis, leading to faster iteration cycles.

Drive Strategic Value by Leveraging AI for User Insight and Personalization

The second, more critical step is to leverage AI to unlock new avenues of business value and strategic impact. This involves shifting the design focus from merely building interfaces to designing intelligent, highly personalized, and data-driven experiences.

• Design for Intelligent Experiences: Focus on how AI can create new, valuable product features that are useful, transparent, and trustworthy. For example, designing the inputs, outputs, and feedback loops for AI features such as personalization engines, intelligent recommendations, and automated workflows. 

• Translate AI Insights into Actionable Design: Make data-backed decisions that directly improve key business metrics like conversion, retention, and time-to-task completion, and do this using AI to synthesize user data (e.g., behavior patterns, sentiment analysis, task success rates) into clear, actionable design insights.

• Establish Ethical and Responsible AI Design Guardrails: To protect long-term business value and user trust, you must help the company define policies on data privacy, mitigate algorithmic bias, and ensure transparency into how AI influences the user experience. If you lack visibility into this work, ask for it. If your company hasn't started addressing these issues, take charge and lead it. Owning the Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) for ethical AI and experience quality is how you acquire influence and power within the company.

The Short Of It 💥 

Ultimately, protecting your team from vulnerability to layoffs this holiday season requires you to recast and actively promote your essential value proposition. This means achieving immediate fluency in the strategic deployment of AI. This is achieved through two critical, integrated actions:

1. Integrate AI to Enhance Design Efficiency and Scale: Use AI tools to accelerate and expand your creative output.

2. Drive Strategic Value by Leveraging AI for User Insight and Personalization: Apply AI to data to deliver highly personalized experiences that yield significant business impact.

That's it for this week!

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With ❤️ from Sally

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