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

Five recent design graduates. From top left to right: Ashton Landis, Erika Kim, Emma Haines. Bottom row, left to right: Leah Ray, Benedict Allen.

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

Our five design educators. From top left to right: Bradford Prairie, Elena Pacenti, Sean Bacon. Bottom row, left to right: Josh Silverman, Eric Heiman.

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.

This is the first part in a three-part series about the design talent crisis. Read Part II and Part III.

**Part I: The Vanishing Bottom Rung **

Erika Kim’s path to UX design represents a familiar pandemic-era pivot story, yet one that reveals deeper currents about creative work and economic necessity. Armed with a 2020 film and photography degree from UC Riverside, she found herself working gig photography—graduations, band events—when the creative industries collapsed. The work satisfied her artistic impulses but left her craving what she calls “structure and stability,” leading her to UX design. The field struck her as an ideal synthesis, “I’m creating solutions for companies. I’m working with them to figure out what they want, and then taking that creative input and trying to make something that works best for them.”

Since graduating from the interaction design program at San Diego City College a year ago, she’s had three internships and works retail part-time to pay the bills. “I’ve been in survival mode,” she admits. On paper, she’s a great candidate for any junior position. Speaking with her reveals a very thoughtful and resourceful young designer. Why hasn’t she been able to land a full-time job? What’s going on in the design job market? 

Back in January, Jared Spool offered an explanation. The UX job market crisis stems from a fundamental shift that occurred around late 2022—what he calls a “market inversion.” The market flipped from having far more open UX positions than qualified candidates to having far more unemployed UX professionals than available jobs. The reasons are multitude, but include expiring tax incentives, rising interest rates, an abundance of bootcamp graduates, automated hiring processes, and globalization.

But that’s only part of the equation. I believe there’s something much larger at play, one that affects more than just UX or product design, but all design disciplines. One in which the tip of the spear has already been felt by software developers in their job market. AI.

Closing Doors for New Graduates

In the first half of this year, 147 tech companies have laid off over 63,000 workers, with a significant portion of them engineers. Entry-level hiring has collapsed, revealing a new permanent reality. At Big Tech companies, new graduates now represent just 7% of all hires—a precipitous 25% decline from 2023 levels and a staggering 50% drop from pre-pandemic baselines in 2019.

The startup ecosystem tells an even more troubling story, where recent graduates comprise less than 6% of new hires, down 11% year-over-year and more than 30% since 2019. This isn’t merely a temporary adjustment; it represents a fundamental restructuring of how companies approach talent acquisition. Even the most credentialed computer science graduates from top-tier programs are finding themselves shut out, suggesting that the erosion of junior positions cuts across disciplines and skill levels.  

LinkedIn executive Aneesh Raman wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times that in a “recent survey of over 3,000 executives on LinkedIn at the vice president level or higher, 63 percent agreed that A.I. will eventually take on some of the mundane tasks currently allocated to their entry-level employees.”

There is already a harsh reality for entry-level tech workers. Companies have essentially frozen junior engineer and data analyst hiring because AI can now handle the routine coding and data querying tasks that were once the realm for new graduates. Hiring managers expect AI’s coding capabilities to expand rapidly, potentially eliminating entry-level roles within a year, while simultaneously increasing demand for senior engineers who can review and improve AI-generated code. It’s a brutal catch-22: junior staff lose their traditional stepping stones into the industry just as employers become less willing to invest in onboarding them. 

For design students and recent graduates, this data illuminates a broader industry transformation where companies are increasingly prioritizing proven experience over potential—a shift that challenges the very foundations of how creative careers traditionally begin.

While AI tools haven’t exactly been able to replace designers yet—even junior ones—the tech will get there sooner than we think. And CEOs and those holding the purse strings are anticipating this, thus holding back hiring of juniors.

Five recent design graduates. From top left to right: Ashton Landis, Erika Kim, Emma Haines. Bottom row, left to right: Leah Ray, Benedict Allen.

The Learning-by-Doing Crisis

Ashton Landis recently graduated with a BFA in Graphic Design from California College of the Arts (full disclosure: my alma mater). She says:

I found that if you look on LinkedIn for “graphic designer” and you just say the whole San Francisco Bay area, so all of those cities, and you filter for internships and entry level as the job type, there are 36 [job postings] total. And when you go through it, 16 of them are for one or more years of experience. And five of those are for one to two years of experience. And then everything else is two plus years of experience, which doesn’t actually sound like sound like entry level to me. …So we’re pretty slim pickings right now.

When I graduated from CCA in 1995 (or CCAC as it was known back then), we were just climbing out of the labor effects of the early 1990s recession. For my early design jobs in San Francisco, I did a lot of production and worked very closely with more senior designers and creative directors to hone my craft. While school is great for academic learning, nothing beats real-world experience.

Eric Heiman, creative director and co-owner of Volume Inc., a small design studio based in San Francisco, has been teaching at CCA for 26 years. He observes:

We internalize so much by doing things slower, right? The repetition of the process, learning through tinkering with our process, and making mistakes, and things like that. We have internalized those skills.

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

What is an entry level position in design then? Where do those exist? How often have I had these companies hire my students even though they clearly don’t have those requirements. So I don’t know. I don’t know what happens, but it is scary to think we’re losing out on what I thought was really valuable training in terms of how I learned to operate, at least in a studio.

Back to the beginnings of my career, I remember digitizing logos when I interned with Mark Fox, a talented logo designer based in Marin County. A brilliant draftsman, he had inked—and still inks—all of his logos by hand. The act of redrawing marks in Illustrator helped me develop my sense of proportions, curves, and optical alignment. At digital agencies, I started my journey redesigning layouts of banners in different sizes. I would eventually have juniors to do that for me as I rose through the ranks. These experiences—though a little painful at the time—were pivotal in perfecting our collective craft. To echo Bacon, it was “really valuable training.”

Apprenticeships at Agencies

Working in agencies and design studios was pretty much an apprenticeship model. Junior designers shadowed more senior designers and took their lead when executing a campaign or designing more pages for a website.

For a typical website project, as a senior designer or art director, I would design the homepage and a few other critical screens, setting up the look and feel. Once those were approved by the client, junior designers would take over and execute the rest. This was efficient and allowed the younger staff to participate and put their reps in.

Searching for stock photos was another classic assignment for interns and junior designers. These were oftentimes multi-day assignments, but it helped teach juniors how to see. 

But today, generative AI apps like Midjourney and Visual Electric are replacing stock photography. 

From Craft to Curation

As the industry marches towards incorporating AI into our workflows, strategy, judgement, and most importantly taste, are critical skills.

But the paradoxically, how do designers develop taste, craft, and strategic thinking without doing the grunt work?

And not only are they missing out on the mundane work because of the dearth of entry-level opportunities, but also because generative AI can give results so quickly.

Eric Heiman again:

I just give the AI a few words and poof, it’s there. How do you learn how to see things? I just feel like learning how to see is a lot about slowing down. And in the case of designers, doing things yourself over and over again, and they slowly reveal themselves through that process.

Navigating the New Reality

All the recent graduates I interviewed for this piece are smart, enthusiastic, and talented. Yet, Ashton Landis and Erika Kim are struggling to find full-time jobs. 

Landis doesn’t think her negative experience in the job market is “entirely because of AI,” attributing it more to “general unemployment rates are pretty high right now” and a job market that is “clearly not great.”

Questioning Career Choices

Leah Ray, a recent graphic design MFA graduate from CCA, was able to secure a position as International Visual Designer at Kuaishou, a popular Chinese short-form video and live-streaming app similar to TikTok. But it wasn’t easy. Her job search began months before graduation, extending through her thesis work and creating the kind of sustained anxiety that prompted her final school project—a speculative design exploring AI’s potential to predict alternative career futures.

I was so anxious about my next step after graduation because I didn’t have a job lined up and I didn’t know what to do. …I’m a person who follows the social clock. My parents and the people around me expect me to do the right thing at the right age. Getting a nice job was my next step, but I couldn’t finish that, which led to me feeling anxious and not knowing what to do.

But through her tenacity and some luck, she was able to land the job that she starts this month. 

No, it was not easy to find. But finding this was very lucky. I do remember I saw a lot of job descriptions for junior designers. They expect designers to have AI skills. And I think there are even some roles specifically created for people with AI-related design skills, like AI motion designer and AI model designer, sort of something like that. Like AI image training designers.

Ray’s observation reveals a fundamental shift in entry-level design expectations, where AI proficiency has moved from optional to essential, with entirely new roles emerging around AI-specific design skills.

Our five design educators. From top left to right: Bradford Prairie, Elena Pacenti, Sean Bacon. Bottom row, left to right: Josh Silverman, Eric Heiman.

Preparing Our Students

Emma Haines, a designer completing her masters degree in Interaction Design at CCA began her job search in May. (Her program concludes in August.) Despite not securing a job yet, she’s bullish because of the prestige and practicality of the Master of Design program.

I think this program has actually helped me a good amount from where I was starting out before. I worked for a year between undergrad and this program, and between where I was before and now, there’s a huge difference. That being said, since the industry is changing so rapidly, it feels a little hard to catch up with. That’s the part that makes me a little nervous going into it. I could be confident right now, but maybe in six months something changes and I’m not as confident going into the job market.

CCA’s one-year program represents a strategic bet on adaptability over specialization. Elena Pacenti, the program’s director, describes an intensive structure that “goes from a foundational semester with foundation of interaction design, form, communication, and research to the system part of it. So we do systems thinking, prototyping, also tangible computing.” The program’s Social Lab component is “two semester-long projects with community partners in partnership with stakeholders that are local or international from UNICEF down to the food bank in Oakland.” It positions design as a tool for social impact rather than purely commercial purposes. This compressed timeline creates what Pacenti calls curricular agility: “We’re lucky that we are very agile. We are a one-year program so we can implement changes pretty quickly without affecting years of classes and changes in the curriculum.”

Josh Silverman, who chaired it for nearly five years, reports impressive historical outcomes: “I think historically for the first nine years of the program—this is cohort 10—I think we’ve had something like 85% job placement within six months of graduation.”

Yet both educators acknowledge current market realities. Pacenti observes that “that fat and hungry market of UX designers is no longer there; it’s on a diet,” while maintaining optimism about design’s future relevance: “I do not believe that designers will be less in demand. I think there will be a tremendous need for designers.” Emma Haines’s nervousness about rapid industry change reflects this broader tension—the gap between educational preparation and market evolution that defines professional training during transformative periods.

Bradford Prairie, who has taught in San Diego City College’s Graphic Design program for nine years, embodies this experimental approach to AI in design education. “We get an easy out when it comes to AI tools,” he explains, “because we’re a program that’s meant to train people for the field. And if the field is embracing these tools, we have an obligation to make students aware of them and give some training on how to use the tools.”

Prairie’s classroom experiments reveal both the promise and pitfalls of AI-assisted design. He describes a student struggling with a logo for a DJ app who turned to ChatGPT for inspiration: “It generates a lot of expected things like turntables, headphones, and waveforms… they’re all too complicated. They all don’t really look like logos. They look more like illustrations.” But the process sparked some other ideas, so he told the student, “This is kind of interesting how the waveform is part of the turntable and… we can take this general idea and redraw it and make it simplified.”

This tension between AI output and human refinement has become central to his teaching philosophy: “If there’s one thing that AI can’t replace, it’s your sense of discernment for what is good and what is not good.” The challenge, he acknowledges, lies in developing that discernment in students who may be tempted to rely too heavily on AI from the start.

The Turning Point

These challenges are real, and they’re reshaping the design profession in fundamental ways. Traditional apprenticeships are vanishing, entry-level opportunities are scarce, and new graduates face an increasingly competitive landscape. But within this disruption lies opportunity. The same forces that have eliminated routine design tasks have also elevated the importance of uniquely human skills—strategic thinking, cultural understanding, and creative problem-solving. The path forward requires both acknowledging what’s been lost and embracing what’s possible.

Despite her struggles to land a full-time job in design, Erika Kim remains optimistic because she’s so enthused about her career choice and the opportunity ahead. Remarking on the parallels of today versus the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, she says “It’s kind of interesting that I’m also on completely different grounds in terms of uncertainty. But you just have to get through it, you know. Why not?”

In the next part of this series, I’ll focus on the opportunities ahead: how we as a design industry can do better and what we should be teaching our design students. In the final part, I’ll touch on what recent grads can do to find a job in this current market.

For nearly three years, Arc from The Browser Company has been my daily driver. To be sure, there was a little bit of a learning curve. Tabs disappeared after a day unless you pinned them. Then they became almost like bookmarks. Tabs were on the left side of the window, not at the top. Spaces let me organize my tabs based on use cases like personal, work, or finances. I could switch between tabs using control-Tab and saw little thumbnails of the pages, similar to the app switcher on my Mac. Shift-command-C copied the current page’s URL. 

All these little interface ideas added up to a productivity machine for web jockeys like myself. And so, I was saddened to hear in May that The Browser Company stopped actively developing Arc in favor of a new AI-powered browser called Dia. (They are keeping Arc updated with maintenance releases.)

They had started beta-testing Dia with college students first and just recently opened it up to Arc members. I finally got access to Dia a few weeks ago. 

But before diving into Dia, I should mention I also got access to another AI browser, Perplexity’s Comet about a week ago. I’m on their Pro plan but somehow got an invite in my email. I had thought it was limited to those on their much more expensive Max plan only. Shhh.

So this post is about both and how the future of web browsing is obviously AI-assisted, because it feels so natural.

Chat With Your Tabs

To be honest, I used Dia in fits and starts. It was easy to import my profiles from Arc and have all my bookmarks transferred over. But, I was missing all the pro-level UI niceties that Arc had. Tabs were back at the top and acted like tabs (though they just brought back sidebar tabs in the last week). There were no spaces. I felt like it was 2021 all over again. I tried to stick with it for a week. 

What Dia offers that Arc does not is, of course, a way to “chat” with your tabs. It’s a chat sidebar to the right of the web page that has the context of that page you’re on. You can also add additional tabs to the chat context by simply @mentioning them.

In a recent article about Dia in The New York Times, reporter Brian X. Chen describes using it to summarize a 22-minute YouTube video about car jump starters, instantly surfacing the top products without watching the whole thing. This is a vivid illustration of the “chat with your tabs” value prop. Saving time.

I’ve been doing the same thing. Asking the chat to summarize a page for me or explain some technical documentation to me in plain English. Or I use it as a fuzzy search to find a quote from the page that mentions something specific. For example, if I’m reading an interview with the CEO of Perplexity and I want to know if he’s tried the Dia browser yet, I can ask, “Has he used Dia yet?” Instead of reading through the whole thing. 

Screenshot of the Dia browser displaying a Verge article about Perplexity’s CEO, with an AI-generated sidebar summary clarifying that Aravind Srinivas has not used Dia.

Another use case is to open a few tabs and ask for advice. For example, I can open up a few shirts from an e-commerce store and ask for a recommendation.

Using Dia to compare shirts and get a smart casual recommendation from the AI.

Dia also has customizable “skills” which are essentially pre-saved prompts. I made one to craft summary bios from LinkedIn profiles.

Using Dia’s skills feature to generate a summarized biography from a LinkedIn profile.

It’s cool. But I found that it’s a little limited because the chat is usually just with the tabs that you feed Dia. It helps you digest and process information. In other words, it’s an incremental step up from ChatGPT.

Enter Comet.

Browsing Done for You

Comet by Perplexity also allows you to chat with your tabs. Asking about that Verge interview, I received a very similar answer. (No, Aravind Srinivas has not used Dia yet.) And because Perplexity search is integrated into Comet, I find that it is much better at context-setting and answering questions than Dia. But that’s not Comet’s killer feature.

Viewing the same article in Comet, with its AI assistant answering questions about the content.

Instead, it’s doing stuff with your tabs. Comet’s onboarding experience shows a few use cases like replying to emails and setting meetings, or filling an Instacart cart with the ingredients for butter chicken.

Just like Dia, when I first launched Comet, I was able to import my profiles from Arc, which included bookmarks and cookies. I was essentially still logged into all the apps and sites I was already logged into. So I tried an assistant experiment. 

One thing I often do is to look up the restaurants that have availability on OpenTable in Yelp. I tend to agree more with Yelpers who are usually harsher critics than OpenTable diners. So I asked Comet to “Find me the highest rated sushi restaurants in San Diego that have availability for 2 at 7pm next Friday night on OpenTable. Pick the top 10 and then rank them by Yelp rating.” And it worked! And if I really want to, I can say “Book Takaramono sushi” and it would have done so. (Actually, I did and then quickly canceled.)

The Comet assistant helped me find a sushi restaurant reservation. Video is sped up 4x.

I tried a different experiment which is something I heard Aravind Srinivas say in his interview with The Verge. I navigated to Gmail and checked three emails I wanted to unsubscribe to. I asked the assistant, “unsubscribe from the checked emails.” The agent then essentially took over my Gmail screen and opened the first checked email, clicked on the unsubscribe link. It repeated this process for the other two emails though ran into a couple of snags. First, Gmail doesn’t keep the state of the checked emails when you click into an email. But the Comet assistant was smart enough to remember the subject lines of all three emails. For the second email, it had some issues filing out the right email for the form so it didn’t work. Therefore of the three unsubscribes, it succeeded on two. 

The whole process also took about two minutes. It was wild though to see my Gmail being navigated by the machine. So that you know it’s in control, Comet puts a teal glow around the edges of the page, not dissimilar to the purple glow of the new Siri. And I could have stopped Comet at any time by clicking a stop button. Obviously, sitting there for two minutes and watching my computer unsubscribe to three emails is a lot longer than the 20 seconds it would have take me to do this manually, but like with many agents, the thinking is to delegate a process to it and come back later to check it. 

I Want My AI Browser

A couple hours after Perplexity launched Comet, Reuters published a leak with the headline “Exclusive: OpenAI to release web browser in challenge to Google Chrome.” Perplexity’s CEO seems to suggest that it was on purpose, to take a bit of wind from their sails. The Justice Department is still trying to strong-arm Google to divest itself from Chrome. If that happens, we’re talking about breaking the most profitable feedback loop in tech history. Chrome funnels search queries directly to Google, which powers their ad empire, which funds Chrome development. Break that cycle, and suddenly you’ve got independent Chrome that could default to any search engine, giving AI-first challengers like The Browser Company, Perplexity, and OpenAI a real shot at users.

Regardless of Chrome’s fate, I strongly believe that AI-enabled browsers are the future. Once I started chatting with my tabs, asking for summaries, seeking clarification, asking for too-technical content to be dumbed down to my level, I just can’t go back. The agentic stuff that Perplexity’s Comet is at the forefront of is just the beginning. It’s not perfect yet, but I think its utility will get there as the models get better. To quote Srinivas again:

I’m betting on the fact that in the right environment of a browser with access to all these tabs and tools, a sufficiently good reasoning model — like slightly better, maybe GPT-5, maybe like Claude 4.5, I don’t know — could get us over the edge where all these things are suddenly possible and then a recruiter’s work worth one week is just one prompt: sourcing and reach outs. And then you’ve got to do state tracking… That’s the extent to which we have an ambition to make the browser into something that feels more like an OS where these are processes that are running all the time.

It must be said that both Opera and Microsoft’s Edge also have AI built in. However, the way those features are integrated feel more like afterthoughts, the same way that Arc’s own AI features felt like tiny improvements.

The AI-powered ideas in both Dia and Comet are a step change. But the basics also have to be there, and in my opinion, should be better than what Chrome offers. The interface innovations that made Arc special shouldn’t be sacrificed for AI features. Arc is/was the perfect foundation. Integrate an AI assistant that can be personalized to care about the same things you do so its summaries are relevant. The assistant can be agentic and perform tasks for you in the background while you focus on more important things. In other words, put Arc, Dia, and Comet in a blender and that could be the perfect browser of the future.

I was in London last week with my family and spotted this ad in a Tube car. With the headline “Humans Were the Beta Test,” this is for Artisan, a San Francisco-based startup peddling AI-powered “digital workers.” Specifically an AI agent that will perform sales outreach to prospects, etc.

Artisan ad as seen in London, June 2025

I’ve long left the Bay Area, but I know that the 101 highway is littered with cryptic billboards from tech companies, where the copy only makes sense to people in the tech industry, which to be fair, is a large part of the Bay Area economy. Artisan is infamous for its “Stop Hiring Humans” campaign which went up late last year. Being based in San Diego, much further south in California, I had no idea. Artisan wasn’t even on my radar.

Artisan billboard off Highway 101, between San Francisco and SFO Airport

There’s something to be said about shockvertising. It’s meant to be shocking or offensive to grab attention. And the company sure increased their brand awareness, claiming a +197% increase in brand search growth. Artisan CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack writes a post-mortem in their company blog about the campaign:

The impact exceeded our wildest expectations. When I meet new people in San Francisco, 70% of the time they know about Artisan and what we do. Before, that number was around 5%. aHrefs ranked us #2 fastest growing AI companies by brand search. We’ve seen 1000s of sales meetings getting booked.

According to him, “October and November became our biggest months ever, bringing in over $2M in new ARR.”

I don’t know how I feel about this. My initial reaction to seeing “Humans Were the Beta Test” in London was disgust. As my readers know, I’m very much pro-AI, but I’m also very pro-human. Calling humanity a beta test is simply tone-deaf and nihilistic. It is belittling our worth and betting on the end of our species. Yes, yes, I know it’s just advertising and some ads are simply offensive to various people for a variety of reasons. But as technology people, Artisan should know better.

Despite ChatGPT’s soaring popularity, there is still ample fear about AI, especially around job displacement and safety. The discourse around AI is already too hyped up.

I even think “Stop Hiring Humans” is slightly less offensive. As to why the company chose to create a rage-bait campaign, Carmichael-Jack says:

We knew that if we made the billboards as vanilla as everybody else’s, nobody would care. We’d spend $100s of thousands and get nothing in return.

We spent days brainstorming the campaign messaging. We wanted to draw eyes and spark interest, we wanted to cause intrigue with our target market while driving a bit of rage with the wider public. The messaging we came up with was simple but provocative: “Stop Hiring Humans.”

When the full campaign which included 50 bus shelter posters went up, death threats started pouring in. He was in Miami on business and thought going home to San Francisco might be risky. “I was like, I’m not going back to SF,” Carmichael-Jack says in a quote to The San Francisco Standard. “I will get murdered if I go back.”

(For the record, I’m morally opposed to death threats. They’re cowardly and incredibly scary for the recipient, regardless of who that person is.)

I’ve done plenty of B2B advertising campaigns in my day. Shock is not a tactic I would have used, nor would I ever recommend to a brand trying to raise positive awareness. I wish Artisan would have used the services of a good B2B ad agency. There are plenty out there and I used to work at one.

Think about the brands that have used shockvertising tactics in the past like Benetton and Calvin Klein. I’ve liked Oliviero Toscani’s controversial photographs that have been the central part of Benetton’s campaigns because they instigate a positive *liberal *conversation. The Pope kissing Egypt’s Islamic leader invites dialogue about religious differences and coexistence and provocatively expresses the campaign concept of “Unhate.”

But Calvin Klein’s sexualized high schoolers? No. There’s no good message in that.

And for me, there’s no good message in promoting the death of the human race. After all, who will pay for the service after we’re all end-of-lifed?