Ep 294: Did AI Create a UX Resurgence? Following Up a Year Later

In spring 2025, I started researching and writing a webinar in response to the predictions I saw that AI would cause a UX resurgence. AI would crash the plane and they'll rehire us! AI is all hype, and just show you can be strategic to keep your job. Learn more UI design. Employers will understand the importance of Design and good design education.

Did those come true? We ​now have a whole year to look back on. 

We'll start last year's article disagreeing with common predictions, and then this year's article looking back on how incorrect those predictions were. https://medium.com/r-before-d/one-year-later-did-ai-cause-a-ux-resurgence-0fc6968e48f4

You can now buy my new book in most formats. https://AtomicPMF.com  That pages also links to my course on product-market fit and using AI thoughtfully in research! 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:55

Welcome, low ego action heroes and phoenixes. This is Debbie Levitch from Delta CX. Welcome to episode 294. A year later, did AI cause a UX resurgence? We're going to look back at some predictions that were being made in 2024 into 2025. Um, I then wrote and broadcasted about them about a year ago. I started writing an article in April 2025. I finally broadcast it here on the Delta CX Hive channel in uh June 2025 and then published it as an article. And I'm gonna ask you, did AI cause a UX resurgence? Do you see the UX renaissance that we were being promised uh a year or so ago? Do you see uh salaries going up, jobs coming back? But that's what we're going to talk about today. Um so don't forget, all of the links you could possibly want to everything in our world is at dcx.to from our Twitch to our free Patreon and our free Discord, the events and courses that we're running. I've got some courses, live courses coming up, so check them out. Uh all of the coaching that I do. Oh gosh, there's just so much. Just head to dcx.to and drink in all of the links. Uh, and a special welcome, of course, to people listening to the audio only version on all of the podcasting platforms which we now offer. So uh I published an article uh originally uh last year based on the June 2025 broadcast. And basically, uh let's start with a little bit of looking at that article. So let's look back at that article and then we'll look at hey, uh, did any of this come true? Because I didn't think it would, but you tell me. So last year, last April 2025, I started doing a lot of research and I spent two months writing a slide deck that I then presented on the YouTube channel. And it all started when I was hearing that Jared Spool was saying that AI will cause a resurgence in UX jobs and work. But it wasn't just him. I saw uh LinkedIn posts from a lot of other people making similar claims. So again, certainly not just him, but the idea was usually that AI kind of sucks, it's not that great, it'll crash the plane, and then companies will need UXers to fix it. And it usually came with a call to action like learn AI, whatever that was supposed to mean, uh, then or now. Uh very often it might come with a sales pitch for a course or a book, but it sounded like good news was already here and more good news was coming uh a year ago. And of course, we we wanted to believe that, so we pressed like. It was the ultimate in hope bait. But is it likely to happen? This is the question I was asking a year ago uh when I was writing this. Is it happening? Well, AI isn't new, and AI making mistakes isn't new. Are companies generally calling UXers and giving them the task of fixing it? Are we being rehired or laid off less because companies know that when it comes to fixing things, UX researchers and designers are who they really need? Does your job treat you as an empowered person who can come in, diagnose real problems, and suggest insightful solutions, which the company then takes action on? Does this sound like UX reality? How involved are UX designers, researchers, strategists, and service designers in most companies' AI efforts? Some people are, and that's great. Many are not. Or they're Figma jockeys on the periphery designing AI features that somebody already decided. That's not empowered AI problem finding or problem solving. So a year ago I was writing that the hope bait was strong, and we want to believe it. We want to believe that we are important, special, can do strategic work, and will be rehired. But this doesn't seem to match the reality we live in, as noticed by our own experiences, friends' experiences, online communities' experiences, LinkedIn posts about reality, not hope, etc. But what about the future? Won't they need us to design and fix AI? Last year I said, I don't believe any of the claims I saw about AI creating a future UX boom. I want to have hope, but I don't see evidence that these claims are true. I didn't want to assume that knowing two UXers working on AI means this must be true for all of us. So I started researching. I spent months researching and writing a webinar about why I predict that AI and AI agents will not cause a resurgence or renaissance for UX work or workers. Because that's what the evidence pointed to. I looked at the job market, layoffs, articles about which jobs are starting to be replaced by AI, and various other aspects of the reality we're living in. And that webinar was episode 270 here on the channel. So you can find the short link to it at dcx.to slash 270. The first five minutes my microphone didn't work, so skip past that. My slides run for about an hour and then I open it up to questions and comments from people who attended live. The topics I covered included they'll need UXers to fix bad AI, not product managers, engineers, or other roles. They'll want UX to do this. Is this really happening at companies? Good UX education with all the right principles will make a comeback. Companies will care if you are well educated. Really? What's more educated than AI right now? Can you just ask AI stuff instead of getting a lot of expensive education? We'll be more strategic and we'll do more important work when they let us work on or fix the AI. This is what I call the double fantasy. Something that might be great might happen when something else happens, but these might never happen. And even if they did, the outcomes might not be what we fantasize. Claims that AI is no different than other tech leaps in the past, like streaming or typewriters. Is that true? AI is designed to replace human cognition. You use it to replace human cognition, and it is continually fine-tuned based on what you do and how you do it. Every AI tool your job wants you to use is training on you so that it can one day emulate you. And many more points and counterpoints since I had an hour of slides after cutting half my slides. And I wrapped up this article a year ago saying tech jobs aren't dead, but they're in trouble. And many of the people trying to sell you on it's going to bounce back, or you can still make hot money in tech in 2026, are mostly suggesting jobs that train AI. Maybe that's great until AI trains itself, or they move those jobs to people who charge less than we do. Or edits and wrangles AI outputs. That's great until AI edits and fixes itself, or companies choose people who charge less than we do. And these jobs rarely hire entry-level workers, so it's nearly impossible to transition in. Companies want AI trained by and on experts and senior level workers. Look around. You'll know if your line of work is safe or already being cannibalized by other roles, like product managers wanting to do UX work. AI, like companies expecting UXers to use more AI or want PMs to do our work with AI help. Who's correcting who? More autonomous AI agents. Layoffs because companies believe they don't meet need many or any humans who do what you do. And we must be realistic about whether or not this will bounce back. We all want it to, but given the few years of data we already have, it seems unlikely. AI crashes the plane, people apologize, and they dive into AI more. Companies are now declaring their AI first, which seems to have replaced the theater of we're customer first. So that was my article last year, letting people know the short version of what I think and the uh pointing them to the hour of slides that I did in episode 270. So now it's been a year since I started writing that webinar. And I want to know, I you know, I think we don't do enough looking back at people's predictions and and holding them accountable for them and saying, wow, you thought that was coming and you were wrong. Um, so a year later, did AI cause a UX resurgence? A year ago, I started researching and writing a webinar I live streamed called Will AI and AI Agents Create a Resurgence in UX work? There's also an article on Medium that you just heard. Remember those predictions? A year ago we were hearing that UX jobs would come back. Hold on, keep waiting. Famous and unknown voices posted online or held their own webinars and courses to tell you that your job was not only coming back, but that UX was about to enter a renaissance. We heard that UXers just need to dive in hard on learning more UI design since that's what companies really want. And we heard that people who have more formal UX education will be the winners. So how are things a year later? You are the best person to answer that. Has UX seen a resurgence or a renaissance? Are you better understood and appreciated at your job? Do UX roles have more autonomy, empowerment, budget? Have layoffs gone down? Have salaries gone up? Have coworkers or leaders made it clear that they really value UX education? Have you been turned down for a job for not having more formal UX education? That's it. Our current reality tells us the answers. We don't need to Google this one or ask an LLM. We're living it. Our friends are living it. We see what's going on at our workplaces and in our communities. We know whether UX is surging in 2026 or not. But Deb, I'm seeing posts that say UX is growing. Cool. Does that feel real or true? How is your work situation? Do you have a good job? Is it stable and you're unlikely to be laid off or fired? Are you treated and paid well? How about your friends, your ex-colleagues, people in the online communities where you hang out? We think UX might be growing because we see some open jobs. But those are but are those jobs real? Or are they ghost jobs posted to make companies look like they're hiring or growing? Are you trusted to work remotely? Or did you have to come back in an office? Are salaries going up? I'm mostly seeing pay stagnate or drop. Are those real UX jobs? Or are they we need UX experts to train our AI jobs? I'm seeing a lot of those, and I wouldn't call those good UX jobs. The work is temporary and paves a future that few of us want. Also, how many people were laid off to uh to open the job you saw? Yes, we are seeing some companies hiring one or more UXers, but that doesn't mean it's growing. They might be replacing the 10 people they laid off last year by hiring two this year, often at much lower salaries. Scroll through your LinkedIn feed, look for open-to-work banners, people asking for help finding a job, people announcing they just got laid off, etc. You will know if UX is resurging, growing, or being reborn in any positive way. But articles are saying UX isn't collapsing, it's evolving. They say that every year. Who is saying that? Probably someone who doesn't want you to unsubscribe or walk away from their paid materials. I'm not afraid to say that we're in trouble. It's made my online communities smaller. Fewer people will see my videos, buy my books, read my articles. New book, everybody? Uh read my articles, etc. But hopefully you are planting seeds for a more stable future in something else, possibly outside of tech or corporate. It's not collapsing, it's evolving. Sounds like a pat on the head. We hope for a night on a white horse, but we're getting a this is fine dog meme playing out in real life. We can keep telling ourselves and each other that UX is critical. I know it's critical, but if the people who pay our salaries don't believe that, it won't matter if UX is critical is true. So many years of just do design thinking, everybody's a designer, and democratize UX so that everybody can do it are hard to undo. We spend a lot of time teaching everybody that they can easily do our jobs, so they are. And if people can easily do it, so can AI. It's evolving, but it might evolve away from specialists because too many loud voices spent too many years telling companies they could do that. Looking back at some of the claims from a year ago, a year ago, Jared Spool was saying things like AI hallucinates too much, AI is saving very little money for enterprises, the world romanticizes AI as an all-powerful, game-changing, sci-fi-like technology when in reality it barely works. Reality is about to set in, and the disappointment will be profound. I blocked that guy years ago, and I don't completely stay on top of what he says or does now, but various people seem to enjoy updating me on his latest claims and courses. I was made aware that he went from saying the above in early 2025 to saying later in 2025 that he doesn't use AI and that we've seen its best days, to I'm afraid I don't know much about AI, it's not a topic I'm interested in, to Jared Spool in March 2026 having a Maven course about AI and UX that hundreds of people have taken. You can pay him$399 for a course about how AI is changing everything and you must intentionally design your AI capabilities. I guess you could learn about AI from someone who either just started using it a few months ago or might not be using it. Either way, as he doesn't do many projects anymore, I wonder if Spool can show himself using AI in real UX projects right now. So where do we go from here? Go with empirical data over anybody's promises or predictions. You know what you experienced last year and you know what it looks like now. You know what your friends are going through, what your ex-manager is going through. You've seen UX thought leaders on LinkedIn change their stories. I still recommend my Life After Tech book. If you are done with tech or corporate work, or they're done with you, this book will give you some career direction. You don't have to quit tech or corporate, but AI is unlikely to cause a UX resurgence or renaissance. It would be smart to plan what might be next and plant some seeds just in case you need that harvest. And if you want to intentionally design your AI capabilities, may I biasedly suggest my new course, AI and Excellent Research. You can find it at dcx.to. Just click the courses link and you'll get$100 off uh coupon there. It is got, I think, 18 or 24 hours of live instruction. Yeah, it's well, it's eight, the eight uh six times three is eighteen. So it's eighteen hours over 24 hours of live instruction, demonstrations, and actual teaching. I've been using AI in problem finding, problem solving, and strategic work for over a year. It's now a year and a half. I've refined what I do and how I do it. I'm actively doing the work and using the tools. I've seen what works well, how to get the best out of current LLMs, and where AI is likely to slow you down or work against you. And don't wait for a night on a white horse. Corporations and employers are not investing in our upskilling and growth. They are gleefully cutting us early and often, and then they're rewarded by their stock price soaring. Layoffs used to be the most embarrassing thing a company could do just before it got sold or rated. Now they're a fun Tuesday activity that'll increase your company's perceived value. I believe that tech jobs will be around a while longer, but that the future is in the human services that AI can't replicate and won't do well for quite some time. It goes way beyond be more strategic and have more empathy when AI can do or emulate those well. AI is not going to save us. AI crashes the plane daily. But few or no companies respond by hiring more UXers. They apologize and promise the AI will be better in the next update. Start planting seeds for your future. Okay, that was the original article. And don't forget to watch the full uh uh episode 270 here on uh the channel. So that was dcx.to slash 270. And uh let's look at some of the comments that came in while I read that. Albert on YouTube says, I laugh whenever a PM or engineer shows off their UX ready design and expects full sign off from me, and then I proceed to tear it apart. Yes. Anna Lucia says, and beware of phobo, fear of becoming obsolete. One thing I noticed as a massive trend on LinkedIn is people inducing phobo. That's toxic, honestly, and you should stay away from anyone who says that. Yeah, we've been hearing that for uh forever. Basically, there's always a new technology or something where if you are not using it 1 million percent and right away, you're obsolete, you're a dinosaur, you'll lose your job to the people doing that. And we hear it over and over with pretty much every technology that comes out. Who remembers when NFT came NFTs came out and everyone acted like, oh, if you are not making and buying and selling NFTs, you're just a dinosaur, you don't like innovation. And then I said, No, these are foolish investments that are going to be worth nothing in the blink of an eye. And guess who's right? And when design thinking came out, people were like, oh, you can't be against design thinking. You're a dinosaur, you're obsolete. Uh, someone who's good at design thinking will take your job, which actually didn't happen. And now we look back at design thinking, we go, maybe we shouldn't have taken a full process that worked really well and tried to do it in hours or days versus the weeks or months a good process sometimes takes. Maybe we shouldn't have done that. Maybe that didn't work very well. There's uh so many articles now, even from uh places people claim to respect, uh, that say, yep, actually design thinking is controversial and dead. But yet at the time, everybody acts like if you're not doing this, you're a dinosaur who's going to be left behind and everyone's going to take your job. Uh Anna Lucia says, I hate it when I try to be realistic about AI and people say I'm a downer. Look, it's nice, but it's not all that. That's what they want your CEO and bosses to think. Yeah, I mean, I I've been on the fence about AI pretty much since the beginning. I see some positives from it. I use it and I see some positives from it. Uh, but then I also see plenty of negatives as well. Um, Es Ray's is here. Hello. There's a saying, only the rocks remain in the river. AI hype will pass, Bell is ha ha, says Es Ray's. Um, yes, the river will still have rocks. And as I've been telling people, UX lives on. Um, I'd made a graphic uh a few weeks ago for the uh fire the people who remembers the episode of fire the people who say that their industry is dead. You know, if a design leader says design is dead, fire that person. That's not a design leader. If a design leader says the design process is dead, fire that person. That's not a design leader. Because the bottom line is design, UX, UX user experience, customer experience, design with a capital D. These things are eternal. Whether they they existed before computers and they will exist past my lifetime. The only question is, does anybody care to do these things well? That's the variable. They're not dead, they exist, they will live on. Design will live longer than all of our jobs. But design is very much alive. UX is always alive. If it can someone who's watching right now please name a product or service that does not have a user experience, there's no user experience at all, and therefore nobody needs to do any UX work for it. It just doesn't exist. Every single thing has a user experience. This pen, this headset, the screen we're all looking at, the fact that I'm streaming online, emails, apps, SaaS systems, everything has a user experience. We interface with everything, whether it's digital or physical. We can design these things well, or we can design these things badly, carelessly, thoughtlessly, with no attention to quality, with little attention to detail. That's where the variation is. You decide. You decide how much you care about quality and delivering value to your customers. But UX lives on, the design lives on, these things will live on, and if somebody says they're dead, I would challenge them to say, how? Do you think UX is dead as a profession? Maybe, uh maybe not, it's not dead now. People still work in it. If you still have people working in it, it is not dead. I wouldn't say it's a human grade, but it's not dead. It will be dead when zero people work in it. Can we think of a line of work that zero people work in? Old-fashioned type setting? There's probably almost zero people working in type setting now that we have other ways to print things. Putting data on punch cards? Okay, that that's kinda dead. Nobody's really putting data on punch cards anymore. We can certainly name some things that are dead. UX isn't dead. UX work isn't dead, but it's also not having a resurgence and renaissance. So I think we just have to be a little bit more even about some of the things we say, and we have to stay away from both the hope bait and the rage bait. It's gonna be tough, everybody, but we can do it. Um, okay, so we've got some people watching live on the Twitch and the YouTube. Won't you please join our community? It's totally free. And also check DCX.tu for all of our links, uh, Discord, uh, free Patreon, medium articles, uh, courses. I'm running courses right now that I'm teaching live. Hello, person watching on LinkedIn. We're down to one. Um, yeah, anybody have any last questions or comments or thoughts before we wrap up the show for today? And while we wait to see if anybody has, I like to say uh shoot an emoji, send an emoji if you are typing something so I know to wait for your uh typing. Uh, but just a reminder tomorrow is Wednesday, so I'll be doing my usual uh ask anything office hours at 7 p.m. Italy time. So come back here and I will happily answer any question for free. Albert says, Why do we need a designer? I always answer back. What is our moat? When any company or customer can create their own bespoke application with their data, how do you stand out? Um, yes, I can't tell if you are asking seriously or if that is rhetorical. Um, but I believe if you're asking seriously, I believe we do still need designers, and that we're gonna need them for a while. That doesn't mean companies get it and are gonna hire them. So I want to make sure people understand there's a difference between what I believe is important and what I believe companies are doing and will do. But to me, designers and all of the people under that UX and CX umbrella are are endlessly important. Um, because sure, anybody can create their own thing if they uh have their data and if they are good with uh LLM tools, but that might not be most of our customers. If we take a look at who our customers are, and it's usually you know a bell curve where we have most people are in this kind of average place, the large average, and then we have these people at the ends of the bell curve. And right now we're at the point where record okay, rhetorical experience is the moat. Good vibes. Yeah, if anybody else is typing a comment or a question, just shoot a little emoji up or put it up so I know to wait for you for typing because uh YouTube is delayed, I think, uh uh 20 or 30 seconds, and LinkedIn is delayed almost a minute, and I won't know you're typing. So, yeah, the the experience is uh not replaceable. And of course, we tend to find these things out the hard way, but again, a lot of that is in new book Atomic Product Market Fit because hey, we should actually care if our products, services, features, interactions, touch points, trust, pricing, everything fit our market. Imagine that. Okay, so as I was saying, live tomorrow for Wednesday office hours, ask me anything. There's a link at dcx.to if you want to ask a question early. Um, and then I think that's it for streaming for the rest of this week. Um, because Saturday we'll be finishing my live Maven course called AI and Excellent Research. If you're a curious cat, just head over to dcx.to, click courses, and read all about it. Um, the next one will be in late May, so there's still time to sign up. And then let's see, we've got our Tuesday show, and that's going to be next Tuesday. I'm going to be talking about uh a little economic theory I've invented that I'm calling the Levit Loop, uh AI consumerism and quality. It's got some future predictions in there. So you might be a curious cat. And so uh we're gonna talk a little bit about um AI bubbles bursting and how I believe uh there's gonna be two waves of AI bubbles bursting, and then we're gonna be talking about the Levit Loop. So uh, like today, we're gonna read two articles and discuss both of them on next Tuesday's show. Same time, 10:30 p.m. Italy. I'm experimenting with these later times to see if we get more people joining live. So um messing around with time. So definitely check the event calendar to see when things are because I am experimenting with times. I'm so experimental. All right, well, I'm going to start wrapping up the show. We'll play the wrapping up music. Thank you to everybody uh who joined live, everybody listening on the podcast version, and people watching later where it's archived on YouTube on the Delta CX Hive channel. This was episode 294. Uh, if you're watching on YouTube, please press like, leave a comment after the stream is over to help us with the algorithm, and if you see a hype button, press it. Uh, YouTube is now letting you hype videos. They just keep stealing from Twitch. I I prefer Twitch. Um, all right, that is it. Thank you again, and catch everybody tomorrow for asking anything at the earlier time, 7 p.m. time. See you later.