Why Young Designers Are the Antidote to AI Automation

In Part I of this series, I wrote about the struggles recent grads have had finding entry-level design jobs and what might be causing the stranglehold on the design job market.

Part II: Building New Ladders 

When I met Benedict Allen, he had just finished with Portfolio Review a week earlier. That’s the big show all the design students in the Graphic Design program at San Diego City College work toward. It’s a nice event that brings out the local design community where seasoned professionals review the portfolios of the graduating students.

Allen was all smiles and relief. “I want to dabble in different aspects of design because the principles are generally the same.” He goes on to mention how he wants to start a fashion brand someday, DJ, try 3D. “I just want to test and try things and just have fun! Of course, I’ll have my graphic design job, but I don’t want that to be the end. Like when the workday ends, that’s not the end of my creativity.” He was bursting with enthusiasm.

And confidence. When asked about how prepared he felt about his job prospects, he shares, “I say this humbly, I really do feel confident because I’m very proud of my portfolio and the things I’ve made, my design decisions, and my thought processes.” Oh to be in my early twenties again and have his same zeal!

But here’s the thing, I believe him. I believe he’ll go on to do great things because of this young person’s sheer will. He idolizes Virgil Abloh, the died-too-young multi-hyphenate creative who studied architecture, founded the fashion label Off-White, became artistic director of menswear at Louis Vuitton, and designed furniture for IKEA and shoes for Nike. Abloh is Allen’s North Star. 

Artificial intelligence, despite its sycophantic tendencies, does not have that infectious passion. Young people are the life blood of companies. They can reinvigorate an organization and bring perspectives to a jaded workforce. Every single time I’ve ever had the privilege of working with interns, I have felt this. My teams have felt this. And they make the whole organization better.

What Companies Must Do

I love this quote by Robert F. Kennedy in his 1966 speech at the University of Cape Town:

This world demands the qualities of youth: not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the life of ease.

As mentioned in Part I of this series, the design industry is experiencing an unprecedented talent crisis, with traditional entry-level career pathways rapidly eroding as the capabilities of AI expand and companies anticipate using AI to automate junior-level tasks. Youth is the key ingredient that sustains companies and industries.

The Business Case for Juniors

Just as important as the energy and excitement Benedict Allen brings, is his natural ability to wield AI. He’s an AI native.

In my conversation with him, he’s tried all the major chatbots and has figured out what works best for what. “I’ve used Gemini as I find its voice feature amazing. Like, I use it all the time. …I use Claude sometimes for writing, but I find that the writing was not as good as ChatGPT. ChatGPT felt less like AI-speak. …I love Perplexity. That’s one of my favorites as well.”

He’s not alone. Leah Ray, who recently graduated from California College of the Arts with an MFA in Graphic Design, says that she can’t remember how her design process existed without AI, saying, “It’s become such an integral part of how I think and work.”

She parries with ChatGPT, using it as a creative partner:

I usually start by having a deep or sometimes extended conversation with ChatGPT. And it’s not about getting the direct answer, but more about using the dialogue to clarify my thoughts and challenging my assumptions and even arrive at a clear design direction.

She’ll go on and use the chatbot to help with project planning and timelines, copywriting, code generation, and basic image generation. Ray has even considered training her own AI model using tools like ComfyUI or LoRA that are based on her past design work. She says, “So it could assist me in generating proposals that match my visual styles.” Pretty advanced stuff.

Similar to Ray, Emma Haines, who is finishing up her MDes in Interaction Design at CCA, says that AI “comes into the picture very early on.” She’ll use ChatGPT for brainstorming and project planning, and less so in the later stages.

Unlike many established designers, these young ones don’t see AI as threatening, nor as a crutch. They treat AI as any other tool. Ashton Landis, who recently graduated from CCA with a BFA in Graphic Design, says, “I think right now it’s primarily a tool instead of a replacement.”

Elena Pacenti, Director of MDes Interaction Design at CCA, observes that students have embraced AI immediately and across the board. She says generative AI has been “adopted immediately by everyone, faculty and students” and it’s being used to create text, images, and all sorts of visual content—not just single images, but storyboards, videos, and more. It’s become just another tool in their toolkit.

Pacenti notices that her students are gravitating toward using AI for efficiency rather than exploration. She sees them “embracing all the tools that help make the process faster, more efficient, quicker” to get to their objective, rather than using AI “to explore things they haven’t thought about or to make things.” They’re using it as a shortcut rather than a creative partner. 

Restructure Entry-Level Roles

I don’t think it’s quite there yet, but AI will eventually take over the traditional tasks we give to junior designers. Anthropic recently released an integration with Canva, but the results are predictable—barely a good first draft. For companies that choose to live on the bleeding edge, that will likely be within 12 months. I think in two years, we’ll cede more and more of these junior-level design tasks like extending designs, resizing assets, and searching for stock to AI.

But I believe there is still a place for entry-level designers in any organization. 

Firstly, the tasks can simply be done faster. When we talk about AI and automation, oftentimes the human who’s initiating the task and then judging its output isn’t part of the conversation. Babysitting AI takes time and more importantly, breaks flow. I can imagine teaching a junior designer how to perform these tasks using AI and just stack up more in a day or week. They’ll still be able to practice their taste and curation skills with supervision from more senior peers.

Second, younger people are inherently better with newer technologies. Asking a much more senior designer to figure out advanced prototyping with Lovable or Cursor will be a non-starter. But junior designers should be able to pick this up quickly and become indispensable pairs of hands in the overall process.

Third, we can simply level up the complexity of the tasks we give to juniors. Aneesh Raman, chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn, wrote in The New York Times:

Unless employers want to find themselves without enough people to fill leadership posts down the road, they need to continue to hire young workers. But they need to redesign entry-level jobs that give workers higher-level tasks that add value beyond what can be produced by A.I. At the accounting and consulting firm KPMG, recent graduates are now handling tax assignments that used to be reserved for employees with three or more years of experience, thanks to A.I. tools. And at Macfarlanes, early-career lawyers are now tasked with interpreting complex contracts that once fell to their more seasoned colleagues. Research from the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management backs up this switch, indicating that new and low-skilled workers see the biggest productivity gains and benefits from working alongside A.I. tools.

In other words, let’s assume AI will tackle the campaign resizing or building out secondary and tertiary pages for a website. Have junior designers work on smaller projects as the primary designer so they can set strategy, and have them shadow more senior designers and develop their skills in concept, strategy, and decision-making, not just execution.

Invest in the Leadership Pipeline

The 2023 Writers Guild of America strike offers a sobering preview of what could happen to the design profession if we’re not careful about how AI reshapes entry-level opportunities. Unrelated to AI, but to simple budget-cutting, Hollywood studios began releasing writers immediately after scripts were completed, cutting them out of the production process where they would traditionally learn the hands-on skills needed to become showrunners and producers. As Oscar-winning writer Sian Heder (CODA) observed, “A writer friend has been in four different writers rooms and never once set foot on set. How are we training the next generation of producers and showrunners?” The result was a generation of writers missing the apprenticeship pathway that transforms scriptwriters into skilled creative leaders—exactly the kind of institutional knowledge loss that weakens an entire industry.

The WGA’s successful push for guaranteed on-set presence reveals what the design industry must do to avoid a similar talent catastrophe. Companies are avoiding junior hires entirely, anticipating that AI will handle execution tasks—but this eliminates the apprenticeship pathway where designers actually learn strategic thinking. Instead, they need to restructure entry-level roles to guarantee meaningful learning opportunities—pairing junior designers with real projects where they develop taste through guided decision-making. As one WGA member put it, “There’s just no way to learn to do this without learning on the job.” The design industry’s version of that job isn’t Figma execution—it’s the messy, collaborative process of translating business needs into human experiences. 

Today’s junior designers will become tomorrow’s creative directors, design directors, and heads of design. Senior folks like myself will eventually age out, so companies that don’t invest in junior talent now won’t have any experienced designers in five to ten years. 

And if this is an industry-wide trend, young designers who can’t get into the workforce today will pivot to other careers and we won’t have senior designers, period.

How Education is Responding

The Irreplaceable Human Element

When I spoke to the recent grads, all five of them mentioned how AI-created output just has an air of AI. Emma Haines:

People can tell what AI design looks like versus what human design looks like. I think that’s because we naturally just add soul into things when we design. We add our own experiences into our designs. And just being artists, we add that human element into it. I think people gravitate towards that naturally, just as humans.

It speaks to how educators are teaching—and have always been teaching—design. Bradford Prairie, a professor at San Diego City College:

We always tell students, “Try to expose yourself to a lot of great work. Try to look at a lot of inspiration. Try to just get outside more.” Because I think a lot of our students are introverts. They want to sit in their room and I tell them, “No, y’all have to get out in the world! …and go touch grass and touch other things out in the world. That’s how you learn what works and what doesn’t, and what culture looks like.

Leah Ray, explaining how our humanity imbues quality into our designs:

You can often recognize an AI look. Images and designs start to feel like templates and over-predictable in that sense. And everything becomes fast like fast food and sometimes even quicker than eating instant food.

And even though there is a scary trend towards synthetic user research, Elena Pacenti, discourages it. She’ll teach her students to start with provisional user archetypes using AI, but then they’ll need to perform primary research to validate it. “We’re going to do primary to validate. Please do not fake data through the AI.”

Redefining Entry-Level Value

I only talked to educators from two institutions for this series, since those are the two I have connections to. For both programs, there’s less emphasis on hard skills like how to use Figma and more on critical thinking and strategy. I suspect that bootcamps are different.

Sean Bacon, chair of the Graphic Design program at San Diego City College:

Our program is really about concepting, creative thinking, and strategy. Bradford and I are cautiously optimistic that maybe, luckily, the chips we put down, are in the right part of the board. But who knows?

I think he’s spot on. Josh Silverman, who teaches courses at CCA’s MDes Interaction Design, and also a design recruiter, observes: 

So what I’m seeing from my perspective is a lot of organizations that are hiring the kind of students that we graduate from the program, what I like to call a “dangerous generalist.” It’s someone who can do the research, strategy, prototyping, visual design, presentation, storytelling, and be a leader and make a measurable impact. And if a company is restructuring or just starting and only has the means to hire one person, they’re going to want someone who can do all those things. So we are poised to help a lot of students get meaningful employment because they can do all those things.

AI as Design Material, Not Just Tool

Much of the AI conversation has been about how to incorporate it into our design workflows. For UX designers, it’s just as important to discuss how we design AI experiences for users.

Elena Pacenti champions this shift in the conversation. “My take on the whole thing has been to move beyond the tools and to understand AI as a material we design with.” Similar to the early days of virtual reality, AI is an interaction paradigm with very few UI conventions and therefore ripe for designers to invent. Right now.

This profession specifically designs the interaction for complex systems, products, services, a combination—whatever it is out there—and ecosystems of technologies. What’s the next generation of these things that we’re going to design for? …There’s a very challenging task of imagining interactions that are not going just through a chatbot, but they don’t have shape yet. They look tremendously immaterial, more than the past. It’s not going to be necessarily through a screen. 

Her program at CCA has implemented this through a specific elective called “Prototyping with AI,” which Pacenti describes as teaching students to “get your hands dirty and understand what’s behind the LLMs and how you can use this base of data and intelligence to do things that you want, not that they want.” The goal is to help students craft their own tools rather than just using prepackaged consumer AI tools—which she calls “a shift towards using it as a material.”

The Path Forward Requires Collective Action

Benedict Allen’s infectious enthusiasm after Portfolio Review represents everything the design industry risks losing if we don’t act deliberately. His confidence, creativity, and natural fluency with AI tools? That’s the potential young designers bring—but only if companies and educational institutions create pathways for that talent to flourish.

The solution isn’t choosing between human creativity and artificial intelligence. It’s recognizing that the combination is more powerful than either alone. Elena Pacenti’s insight about understanding “AI as a material we design with” points toward this synthesis, while companies like KPMG and Macfarlanes demonstrate how entry-level roles can evolve rather than disappear.

This transformation demands intentional investment from both sides. Design schools are adapting quickly—reimagining curriculum, teaching AI fluency alongside fundamental design thinking, emphasizing the irreplaceable human elements that no algorithm can replicate. Companies must match this effort. Restructure entry-level roles. Create new apprenticeship models. Recognize that today’s junior designers will become tomorrow’s creative leaders.

The young designers I profiled here prove that talent and enthusiasm haven't disappeared. They’re evolving. Allen’s ambitious vision to start a fashion brand. Leah Ray’s ease with AI tools. The question isn’t whether these designers can adapt to an AI-enabled future.

It’s whether the industry will create space for them to shape it.

In the final part of this series, I’ll explore specific strategies for recent graduates navigating this current job market—from building AI-integrated portfolios to creating alternative pathways into the profession.