If building is cheap and the real bottleneck is knowing what to build, interface design faces the same squeeze. Nielsen Norman Group’s annual State of UX report argues that UI is no longer a differentiator.

Kate Moran, Raluca Budiu, and Sarah Gibbons, writing for Nielsen Norman Group:

UI is still important, but it’ll gradually become less of a differentiator. Equating UX with UI today doesn’t just mislabel our work — it can lead to the mistaken conclusion that UX is becoming irrelevant, simply because the interface is becoming less central.

Design systems standardized the components. AI-mediated interactions now sit on top of the interface itself. The screen matters less when users talk to an agent instead of navigating pages. The report lays out where that leaves designers:

As AI-powered design tools improve, the power of standardization will be amplified and anyone will be able to make a decent-looking UI (at least from a distance). If you’re just slapping together components from a design system, you’re already replaceable by AI. What isn’t easy to automate? Curated taste, research-informed contextual understanding, critical thinking, and careful judgment.

The whole report is worth reading. The thread through all of it—job market, AI fatigue, UI commodification—is that surface-level work won’t survive leaner teams and stronger scrutiny. The value is in depth.