AI is a partner. Your judgement is the advantage.

Imagine you're an architect designing a home for a family.

You have access to a tool that can generate hundreds of beautiful house designs in seconds. Different layouts, impressive interiors, creative use of space and architectural features you might never have considered.

Everything looks promising.

But there's something the tool doesn't automatically know.

It doesn't know that one family member uses a wheelchair, that the parents need a quiet space to work from home or that the children need room to play safely.

Without understanding the people who will live in that home, even the most impressive design could fail to meet their everyday needs.

I think about generative AI in much the same way when it comes to product design.

We're at a point where AI tools can help us explore ideas, generate layouts, develop content and move through certain stages of the design process much faster than before.

And that's exciting, especially when you consider how much time we can save and the possibilities we can explore.

But I've also come to appreciate something about working with AI.

The ability to generate something quickly doesn't automatically mean we've arrived at the right solution.

Let me share a practical example from one of my design projects.

While designing a food-ordering app, I worked with generative AI to explore ideas and develop screens for different stages of the customer journey.

At one point, we were working on the screen a customer would see immediately after placing an order. The AI-generated design looked good, but something caught my attention.

It was already telling the customer that their food was on its way!

Hold on! The customer had only just placed the order. We hadn't even established that the restaurant had started preparing the food, let alone dispatched it for delivery.

I immediately spotted the error.

The appropriate screen at that point should have confirmed that the order had been placed successfully. Information about preparation and delivery would come later as the order progressed.

Now, imagine if I had simply accepted that screen because it looked polished and the AI had generated it confidently.

We would have introduced misleading information into the user journey, potentially creating confusion and unrealistic expectations for the customer.

It might seem like a small detail, but these are the kinds of decisions that influence how people experience and trust a digital product.

And this is exactly why human judgement matters when working with AI.

As someone who works across product design and AI literacy, I've learned to pay close attention to what happens before and after an AI-generated output.

Before I even write a prompt, I need to understand what I'm trying to achieve. Who am I designing for? What problem am I addressing? What should the person using this product be able to do?

These questions influence how I communicate with AI and how I evaluate what it produces.

Sometimes, the first response gives me a useful direction to explore. Other times, it reveals gaps in my instructions or assumptions I need to reconsider.

I might need to revisit the user journey, simplify the language on a screen or rethink an interaction that looks visually appealing but creates unnecessary friction for the user.

And this is where I find the process particularly interesting.

AI gives me opportunities to explore possibilities faster, but I still have to apply my understanding of the problem, make informed decisions and take responsibility for the experience I'm creating.

The more I work with these tools, the more I recognise the importance of developing both AI literacy and strong professional judgement.

Knowing how to prompt effectively is valuable. Knowing how to question an output, recognise its limitations and improve on what has been generated is equally important.

Here's something worth considering when presenting your next project.

If you used AI during your design process, go beyond mentioning the tools you worked with.

Talk about a decision you made.

Perhaps AI suggested a layout that looked impressive, but you realised the next action wasn't clear enough for the user.

Or perhaps an early suggestion made you revisit your research and reconsider an assumption about what users actually needed.

Explain what influenced your decision and how that thinking shaped the final outcome.

That part of your process deserves to be visible too.

It helps people understand how you approach problems, evaluate possibilities and contribute your own expertise to the work.

And I think this matters even more as AI becomes increasingly integrated into how we work.

The value of your work goes beyond what you can generate. It also shows in what you choose to improve, what you decide to change and the reasons behind those decisions.

Just as an architect must understand the people who will live in a building, we must understand the people who will use the products we create.

AI can help us explore what is possible. Our judgement helps us decide what is appropriate, useful and worth building.

And here's something I believe we should be paying more attention to as AI becomes part of our everyday work.

The quality of an AI-generated output is not the only thing we should be evaluating. We should also be developing our ability to recognise when something is wrong, even when it looks convincing.

Because the ability to identify a problem that AI has overlooked is itself an important demonstration of expertise.

And that responsibility remains ours.