Jakob Nielsen starts from OpenAI’s new $4 billion consulting arm and its acquihire of 150 Forward Deployed Engineers, the kind who embed with a client instead of building from headquarters. His argument is that they solve the wrong level of the problem: you can speed up the work without changing it. The missing counterpart he proposes is the Forward Deployed Designer.

Nielsen draws the line between faster individual work and a faster business:

With AI, the old workflows must no longer be treated as the design brief; they must be questioned at the root. AI is, in fact, a great productivity enhancer even when used in the traditional way to increase the efficiency of individual employees performing the same tasks as always, just faster and better. A paralegal can summarize a legal brief in seconds; a junior developer can write boilerplate code instantly; a digital marketer can generate campaign copy with a single prompt. We can typically improve that employee’s performance on those specific rote tasks by roughly 40%.

But at the company-wide level, such local productivity gains rarely translate into substantial profit gains and shareholder value. When you have a long chain of steps and optimize only a few, the delay simply shifts to the remaining steps, which will dominate the overall time to solve the underlying problem.

Nielsen again:

Once AI removes the cognitive bottleneck, a different bottleneck appears: authority. The limiting question becomes not “Can the system know what to do?” but “Is the system allowed to do it?” AI-native workflow design must therefore redesign decision rights, escalation rules, audit trails, and accountability boundaries. Otherwise, the organization merely replaces slow human cognition with fast machine recommendations waiting for the same old human permission structure.