In their December 2025 survey, Noam Segal and Lenny Rachitsky found that designers were getting less from AI than their peers. I wondered whether designers were failing to make the shift from production to strategy. Their 2026 survey points to a harsher answer: AI is raising output expectations faster than organizations are redesigning work around human judgment.
But then we looked closer at what “better at my job” means. When we asked people to describe in their own words how AI had changed their work, “better” turned out to mean producing more and faster, but not higher quality. The productivity gains are coupled with deep unease about the costs of leveraging AI.
“I can do more, faster, but not better.”
“Amplified and destabilized at the same time. We just set a new denominator for the job. And it moves higher and higher every month.”
This is what happens when leaders add AI without redesigning jobs. Every saved hour becomes capacity to fill. People still carry the judgment calls and quality bar, only now at machine speed. The tool creates leverage; management decides whether workers experience that leverage as agency or pressure.
Design and research show what happens when that redesign lags:
Among researchers, 51% are “anxious about my job security,” versus 15% of founders. Among designers, 63% feel “overwhelmed by the pace of change” and 61% feel “tired,” the highest of any role. Researchers are among the most likely to fear “losing my job to AI” (36%, just behind Data/Analytics at 38%), and designers are the most likely to feel the comp squeeze (61% selected “expected to do more for the same compensation”). Both report the lowest willingness to recommend their field of any role, and designers, as we’ll see, report the worst-rated managers in the survey.
Last year, designers and researchers showed the largest negative sentiment shift of any group. A year later, they’re the most negative on nearly every measure we have.
The damage also reaches the people who have not entered the field yet. Experienced workers can augment judgment built over years, while companies automate the tasks through which juniors would have developed that judgment. The industry must rebuild the apprenticeship pipeline, not merely reopen entry-level requisitions. Segal and Rachitsky’s respondents can already see the break:
More than half of working tech professionals would actively steer a newcomer away from the path they chose. That translates to an average NPS score of –39. Moreover, a third of the people who call themselves optimistic still wouldn’t recommend their own field.
The cleanest way to say it: “The water’s fine; don’t come in.” People have largely made peace with their own trajectory. They’ve got the skills, the relationships, and the seniority to ride it out. But they’ve lost faith that the on-ramp still works for someone behind them.
“I’m lucky I’m later in my career … AI can augment what I’ve built. I think I won’t be in a position to hire and mentor new PMs, but I’ll be safe. Which feels really crappy to say.”
The real split is between people with enough accumulated agency to turn speed into leverage and people forced to absorb speed as a higher baseline. Companies pocketing the gains while neglecting job design and apprenticeship are spending down the human systems that made those gains possible.
