Ethan Mollick, Wharton professor and author of Co-Intelligence, has been running careful benchmarks across models and workflows. His main finding for designers: the shift from chatbots to agents rewards domain expertise, not job title.

What actually mattered was not the profession of the user, but their expertise. The more domain experience someone had, the more successful they were in using Claude Code in that domain. And, even more interestingly, the more useful output they got from Claude from each prompt.

That framing reorients the usual anxiety (“will AI replace designers?”) into a different question: how deep is your domain knowledge, and are you using agents to extend it or to paper over gaps? The underlying shift Mollick is describing:

We are moving from a world where non-experts use chatbots to fill in gaps to one in which experts use agents to get work done. And the best way to use agents is to think of yourself as a manager.

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Being on an exponential means each change over a fixed window is larger than the one before it. If your organization wrote an AI plan any time before the winter of 2025, it described a system that could do a couple of hours of work with a fairly high error rate. A few months later, you can get sixteen hours or more of work from a single prompt. This is why AI keeps feeling like it is making leaps, even though it is a curve on a graph, we keep experiencing a steady doubling of capability as a series of shocks. We are very bad at feeling exponentials from the inside, and we are currently inside one.

The management framing also carries a real cognitive cost. Running multiple agent streams and deciding what to keep draw from the same finite attention budget as the design work itself. Orchestration is its own job.