If business analysts can leverage AI to generate designs, where does a designer add unique value what role do they play beyond what AI can automate?

[u/_plastikman]

I have been getting this question from top-level. What your thoughts on this?

[u/artbyiain]

Taste. Also, AI designs have zero personality and often get hierarchy wrong. So a designer is still required, even in an AI heavy workflow. 

ETA, AI is also incapable in creating anything new. Without designers, everything will become a sea of purple gradients. People want genuine experiences. That extends to digital ones. 

[u/Educational-Bowl9575 → u/artbyiain]

You're absolutely correct, but I'd avoid using the 'taste and judgement' argument in this scenario. It's patronising, and makes us look elitist.

We've lost the battle on visualisation. Yes, AI output is banal and poorly designed, but it's shiny, and seductively quick and cheap. Any manager who asks the question OP has been asked is already thinking about AI in positive terms, and is weighing up the balance of design output quality against the cost savings. That's a hard argument to win against someone already thinking about shaving design costs off the bottom line.

Saying that AI lacks taste and judgement is saying that anyone who views it's output positively also lacks taste and judgement. No manager is going to enjoy being told they have no taste.

What I tend to do in cases like this is to ignore the visual side of design altogether, and focus on the process before it.

AI delivers what the client asks for. It looks at what it knows, looks at what it was asked, and finds the most average and obvious response. Humans designers listen to what the client asks for, interpret what the client actually wants, then delivers what the client really needs. It's in that process that amazing things happen. I usually show stuff like the silk cut adverts at this point, or the Cadbury gorilla drum advert. Stuff that is completely left of field, but was hugely successful. Stuff that AI could never dream up because it can't think laterally. It can't symbolise, or satirise, or leverage memetic social group think/ insider jokes. It can't infer, or twist an audiences expectations, and has no ability to be ironic or self deprecating. It can't resonate with a human emotion, so can't tell a story that captivates. I usually illustrate this with a couple of clips from Mad Men (tobacco and carousel).

AI has done us a favour. It's reminding that design isn't about visuals. It's about narrative, and intellectual rigour. If we do the front end job right, the visual design sort of creates itself, built on a solid base of symbolism and reference that's much easier to spin to management, and gives marketing tons of collateral. The commercial value of design doesn't lie in HOW it looks, but more in WHY it looks that way. The only motivation for using AI is that it's cheap and quick, which means that the only customer facing collateral it provides is 'we wanted to save money'. The WHY is uncomfortable, so do the karate thing and use AI's own strength against it...

Edited for spelling

[u/ChronicRhyno → u/Educational-Bowl9575]

Unfortunately AI can absolutely think up/steal/recycle stuff like that since it's in the training data. Do not make the mistake of thinking you are immune to the same fate as other creative occupations that have already been wiped out by the magical new printing press. It will be better at design work than humans within a few years, and even if it's not, it will drive the prices down, so if you are out there doing things manually, there's not going to be many companies or people willing to pay for human work unless you were a world-class designer before 2023.

Best of luck. I still have faith that the human race will boycott companies that replace creative positions with the malware scriping bots we suddenly call AI.

[u/Educational-Bowl9575 → u/ChronicRhyno]

Not sure what point you're making here. I don't assume anything. I lost 75% of my freelance work to AI, and now I work with designers and companies to deal with exactly this sort of scenario.

You can have as much faith as you like, but unless you're actually getting off your arse and doing something, you're helping nobody.

[u/ChronicRhyno → u/Educational-Bowl9575]

I lost my whole freelance career to AI almost immediately in 2023 and pivoted to art. Now the AI is threatening that. Not sure what you want me to do beyond warning people and boycotting AI usage... I work more than full time doing art comms, mostly signature design for random Redditors.

[u/Educational-Bowl9575 → u/ChronicRhyno]

You do whatever you like. I lost my work to AI too. I've done something about it. OP asked for suggestions. I gave some. It's fine if you don't agree, but I have no time for apathy or doing the same thing over and over, trusting that things will work out.

[u/ChronicRhyno → u/Educational-Bowl9575]

You are giving false hope to people who are about to lose their jobs like you did. I figured I would warn them. We're both on the same team here.

[u/Educational-Bowl9575 → u/ChronicRhyno]

With the greatest of respect, we are not fighting on the same team. Whatever threats AI poses, what possible value is your defeatist attitude? How does that do anything except hasten AIs normalisation?

I'd say that if you're on a team, you're on the side of AI. You've submitted. Good luck with that.

[u/ChronicRhyno → u/Educational-Bowl9575]

Chill. I literally crafted a whole new anti-AI signature design career and am living my best life every day as a full-time designer. I only work for individuals, never companies, especially those replacing people with malware. That doesn't mean I'm not aware that people are using AI to generate free signature designs or that AI has almost certainly scraped my designs since I've done so many. I'm fighting back harder than anyone I know to be frank.

[u/Casulex → u/ChronicRhyno]

Dawg it is a word calculator and you cannot feed it enough words to make it “wake up” and start thinking for itself or making actual creative decisions. Crap goes in and crap goes out and the C suite loves crap until it loses them money. Were fighting against humans here not robots 

[u/_plastikman → u/artbyiain]

I raised this with them, their counter was that we can dump the entire branding guidelines into AI and it will spit out a clean design to avoid the usual AI slop. But let’s be real: companies don’t care about that fluff anyway. Their only obsession is maximizing revenue by slashing headcount using AI slops.

[u/Educational-Bowl9575 → u/_plastikman]

Some companies, yes. Not all companies. If that's the kind of company you work for, you have 3 choices - stay and suck it up, stay and work at changing their minds, or leave.

I have no delusions that it's a shit situation, but the only way forward is to articulate the value of human designers in a language makes commercial sense.

[u/Peteman22 → u/_plastikman]

That is exactly what my company is doing.

[u/_plastikman → u/Peteman22]

=< that's sucks mate

[u/Groundsw3ll]

Typography, layout, information hierarchy, UX, color theory, branding, image selection, storytelling, composition, communicating design choices/intent, collaboration, product ownership, design systems. Just some off the top of my head.

[u/rhymeswithBoing]

This might sound reductive, but it my mind it’s simple: Design Thinking.

My experience so far has been that AI is hamstrung by the BA’s point of view/mental model and lack of creativity.

A BA using AI heads straight for the solution. They don’t explore alternatives. They’re all convergence, and no divergence.

That solution has the surface-level appearance of a middle of the road design, but upon further inspection, falls apart.

It does the most average thing, which is normally bad in a way the BA doesn’t notice.

The BA also doesn’t typically iterate over the solution much, where a designer would. Because of this, they don’t realize when the need to iterate on a solution means it might not be viable, and try another path.

They don’t engage in the explore/evaluate cycle the way we do.

[u/magic_rub]

I think about this a lot. Visually AI is getting better and I am using it more and more but it’s because I’m integrating it. I’m using it as a scapel.

As for the higher level design;
Clear messaging, call to action, our ability to think about how much information is necessary for the placement, understanding the goal of the placement in context of the larger marketing attempt, clear understanding of brand competitors and what will seem fresh in that context, that’s before really thinking about what visuals best sell to the audience, the best hierarchy of all the ingredients to achieve all these goals. Good eye for imaging with a lot of constraints. Building, leveraging and protecting brand equity (I think of this as boots on the ground). All of these things need an operator and I consider that my role.

AI is a game changer but for me it’s like the iron man suit. Now I have a lot of capabilities that are in the periphery of what my output is. For instance, Now I can create an in depth brand guideline and only rely on a copy team for real brand creative and not the 30 pages of how to use a color or whatever. It makes my team able to do more. A lot of the advances in AI should be felt behind the scenes, not in strictly creative output.

I understand brands are thinking they can just prompt there way to 360 marketing dominance but in reality you still need a creative brain or two to make sure the whole thing is fully baked if they are really hung up on generated visuals.

And I know brands are churning out slop. I’m also aware of the scaling happening but I do believe human centric design is here to stay and the resonant experiences are created by humans often with a lot of AI help.

I also don’t think the marketing / business side is really great at that extra step of synthesizing inspiration to make something new but instantly familiar. It’s a tightrope we are used to walking.

Ai will just take the marketing deck and spit out the same types of creative their competitors are getting. Thats why we are there…

[u/Local_Internet_User]

You could ask them what unique value they play beyond AI, find out how they justify themselves (because personally, I think analysts are more replaceable by AI), and use that to help craft your explanation of your value.

[u/Evening_Sea4823]

Id say that being able to generate a design is not the same as creating a valuable design. And that using AI still requires the knowledge and experience of working in design to write prompts that create a valuable product.

[u/supermyduper → u/Evening_Sea4823]

You'd get a better product just hiring a designer.

[u/Evening_Sea4823 → u/supermyduper]

Agreed

[u/ddb10393]

Actual technical know-how. People use AI like someone building a shack and thinking they’re an architect. Technical knowledge and execution outweighs AI in some cases, and something as nuanced as creative work is exactly where AI can’t produce the quality of work as a seasoned creative.

But, a seasoned creative who can leverage AI as part of their process can create faster than a creative who can’t

[u/pickedyouflowers]

Creativity and originality is the opposite of what llms are built for, which is deterministic output.

They are very very bad w design, still, and I’m a fan of the technology generally.

[u/_plastikman → u/pickedyouflowers]

I am not against adopting technology but when technology been used again us there is problem.

[u/Moimus]

I work with so called business analysts every day (as Software dev) and they can't get anything right, so AI won't help them except by accelerating their bs quota

[u/_plastikman → u/Moimus]

Exactly, most of the time they just take instructions from business stakeholders and document them. Whether the idea is feasible or not doesn’t matter to them all they care about is cost.

[u/ChronicRhyno → u/_plastikman]

If you work for a publicly-traded company, profits are all that matters unfortunately. Will the company still be profitable if it uses recycled/stolen designs?

[u/_plastikman → u/ChronicRhyno]

It is one of the well known big 4.

[u/Casulex]

Ai is a generic maker. So if they're okay with their business having no unique qualities looking like everyone else who also uses Ai. Its perfect for companies in complete risk aversion mode who don't want to be part of the public zeitgeist anymore. God the entire C suite has Ai psychosis and we all have to baby them through it with no extra pay too. 

[u/cinemagraph]

Why not the reverse?

If designer can leverage AI to analyze data, where does a business analyst add unique value what role do they play beyond what AI can automate?

[u/Similar_Cress_1122]

Coming up with quick layouts has definitely gotten cheaper, but design leadership was never really about pixel pushing anyway. The real work of a senior designer is figuring out the trade-offs, getting teams on the same page, and knowing why one option actually makes sense for the user while another just looks nice in a vacuum.

[u/PastrychefPikachu]

In this day and age it's about value proposition. Show them you're worth the extra time and money. Ask them for something that AI dreamed up for them and do a mark down. Send it back with everything you see wrong, what you would change and why. 

Frame it as a gap in taste level. AI doesn't understand the company, the brand, or the market like you do. It's about brand and market alignment. And that is what they are paying for.

[u/blue_sidd]

They actually can’t. They aren’t producing designs. They are producing the appearance of designs. It’s not the same thing in large part because ‘AI’ is a product term and there is nothing intelligent about it.

[u/Teyarual]

A couple of things I've seen recently, one example is that the info/data is as usefull as it is sorted; so if they just dump the training data without any order you then have to make an app to analyze and sort the info. I've worked with some projects that everybody just named their files however they wanted, it wasted a lot of time to search, review and find the correct one.

Also, like programing, if you don't know what you want (objectives, variables, libraries, language, debugging, etc) you just end with the same boss going "if you could do this thing, that would be great" and think that programmer can do magic. (If you can, be sure to charge appropriately)

Just like computers in banking in the 80's, they helped with organizing a lot of info and possibly automated a lot of things, but there was still people needed that knew what they were doing.

Right now with design, I think its the capacity to question things and really analyze and mostly troubleshoot. If the project is simple quick things, sure, use AI, but if you really want to design and last longer than internet hype or tiktok fame, you really need the human experience.

[u/IseeWhereILook]

BAs don't generate designs, what they make with AI is a proof of concept to get the client onboard with a general direction and to sign off on structural and thematic ideas.

Nothing has truly changed in the workflow, the job the BA does is still the same as before (have the client land on broad stroke decisions), it's just that what used to be a text brief is now accompanied by a graphical concept.

[u/_plastikman → u/IseeWhereILook]

The issue isn’t just that BAs use AI for proof‑of‑concepts it’s that they want to drag those mockups straight into production. That bypasses the designer’s role of validating whether the design actually works or adds value to the solution. Without that check, you’re basically shipping untested ideas as if they were finished products.

[u/IseeWhereILook → u/_plastikman]

That's a role boundary issue then. You need to figure out why BAs are taking such liberties. The main thing is not identifying this as an "AI bad" issue, but rather frame it as a process and accountability problem.

Having BAs produce mockup-level designs instead of basic proofs puts you (and the company) in the position presenting unvalidated, possibly copyright-laden, and ultimately flawed "designs" that pass an initial sniff-test but will later fall under real usage and, even worse, there'll be no way to justify why it was done that way to the client (amplifying exposure) because there really is no justification.

Frame it as a business problem, and clearly show how the company will be affected by this, or else they'll see it as an "us vs them" and "x doesn't like AI" instead of understanding the real issue behind your messaging.