AI and Design

Dan reports live from Figma's Config 2026 conference in San Francisco, talking with seven design leaders — Peter Merholz, Jesse James Garrett, Greg Petroff, Ryan Freitas, Kim Lenox, Alice Quan, and Emily Campbell — about the keynote, major announcements like Code Layers and Weave, and the vibe on the floor. The conversations circle a few big tensions: Figma's push into Adobe's territory (motion, brand, marketing) versus doubling down on AI-to-code workflows where competitors like Claude Design are gaining ground, the shrinking of design teams, and how designers can stay strategic by leaning into craft, taste, and curiosity. Off-stage, the mood was one of cautious adaptation — less panic than last year, more pragmatic grappling with what roles, tools, and identities look like now.

A year ago the consensus was that AI would hurt Apple. Last week at WWDC they showed up with a real Siri AI, the privacy story nobody else can match, and the $$$ hardware to run it. The "AI for the rest of us" play might just work. Dan and Nik dig into what Apple actually shipped, why App Intents matter for designers, and the gut-punch reality that your year-old iPhone won't run it.

Also this episode: Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is building a design-led AI lab, and nobody can quite figure out what it's selling. Sarah Gibbons maps the four design jobs AI has created so far. And Perplexity's research with Harvard Business School claims agents can cut task time by up to 92% — with enough caveats to fill a show.

LINKS
Secret AI Lab News
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-04/airbnb-ceo-brian-chesky-plans-to-start-a-new-ai-company

The Four Design Jobs AI Created (So Far)
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/design-jobs-ai-created/

Perplexity/HBS Research
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07489

Thinking Machines Demo Video
https://youtu.be/A12AVongNN4?si=ODvSCf9IKTzwBiiU

Dan and Nik dig into Microsoft's sweeping redesign of 365 Copilot , transforming the prompt box into a task-aware workspace, leaning into progressive disclosure, and positioning AI as an embedded layer across Word, Excel, and Outlook rather than a bolt-on feature. They also discuss Jeff Gothelf's argument that "done" means something fundamentally different for AI products, where probabilistic outputs require teams to write acceptance criteria as distributions and build failure triage into launch rather than after. Rounding out the news: Amazon's Proteus warehouse robots can now take natural-language direction from human workers, and a Salesforce designer shares how her team is mastering AI tools through peer-to-peer learning, a dynamic that gives Dan flashbacks to the early days of the web.

Then Nik sits down with Mark Boyes-Smith, Head of AI Design at Miro, for a deep look at how one of the world's largest collaboration platforms is integrating AI at every layer. Mark walks through Miro's new Sidekicks and Flows features, including voice interaction and custom connectors, and talks candidly about how his distributed design team rapid-prototypes in code, branches and remixes ideas, and builds conviction before shipping. He also shares his thinking on designing for long-running agentic tasks, the coming challenge of multi-agent orchestration on an infinite canvas, and what resilience and "product taste" mean for designers navigating an era of relentless change.

LINKS
Microsoft Copilot 365 Redesign
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2026/05/28/introducing-a-new-design-for-microsoft-365-copilot/

What “done” means when you’re shipping AI features
https://jeffgothelf.com/blog/what-done-means-when-youre-shipping-ai-features/

Amazon's new Proteus warehouse robot
https://www.engadget.com/2187338/amazons-new-proteus-warehouse-robot-is-fully-autonomous/

Designing how designers master AI
https://uxdesign.cc/designing-how-designers-master-ai-642d8751d945

New Miro Features at Canvas26
https://www.youtube.com/live/qM-KxCr4I5I?si=HGtSokg95B9kO5k9

Updates to Figma and Google Stitch
https://www.figma.com/blog/figma-make-now-on-your-local-code
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-labs/stitch-updates/

The Design System Advantage is Memory
https://learn.thedesignsystem.guide/p/the-design-system-advantage-is-memory

Fraude Design
https://fraude.design/

Nik's Interview with CEO of Quilter, Sergiy Nesterenko
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergiynesterenko/
https://www.quilter.ai/

This week we talk about Figma's new design agent integrated right on the canvas, the 2026 State of AI in Design Report, and Bain's experiment with synthetic customers. Then Dan interview Llewyn Paine about the future of UXR and design and gives a preview of the Rosenfeld Designing with AI Conference 2026 https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designing-with-ai/

Show Notes:
The Figma Design Agent is Here | Figma Blog
State of AI in Design
Synthetic Customers Earn Their Stripes | Bain & Company
https://www.linkedin.com/in/llewyn/