Contrast this with today. When you think of furniture now, the first thing that comes to mind is likely IKEA. IKEA was an outcome of industrialization, a cheap, quick alternative. But IKEA furniture wasn’t designed to fit my home perfectly, nor was my home designed for it. For example, trying to cover a wall with an IKEA library rarely fills the space perfectly; with few exceptions, the product may miss 5cm or 10cm. This gap is what makes it look “cheap”, not just the material, but the failure to fit the space.
History is now repeating itself. Just as manufacturers once pivoted to automated workflows to make production faster, shifting human labor into new roles, AI is now reshaping digital creation in a similar way. We might be witnessing a kind of digital industrialization. On the web, we are beginning to relate to digital products the way we relate to IKEA furniture: accessible, abundant, and useful, but rarely a perfect fit. What makes this moment feel industrial is not that the work disappears, but that our relationship to the work changes. Agents are automating tasks like coding, designing, and other workflows we used to do by hand, while our role shifts from producing everything ourselves to directing, evaluating, and refining outputs through prompts and oversight. The labor remains, but the craft is increasingly mediated by systems.
On the web, this shift is already changing how people respond to badly fitting products. More and more people are creating their own digital tools to solve everyday problems, whether that means avoiding paywalls, owning their own data, or escaping apps filled with unwanted features, excessive ads, and forced functionality. Instead of settling for software designed around corporate's assumptions, they would rather build an app or website that fits their own needs more precisely. Designing digital products for in-house use is not a new trend; it has existed for a long time. Large companies have always built their own tools whenever existing products failed to fit their workflows. Google, for example, has its own code review platform, and AWS itself began as a solution for Amazon’s internal needs. The reason this approach remained limited was not because the idea was unusual, but because building and maintaining custom products required significant resources. What AI changes is that this barrier is now much lower. More individuals and smaller teams can create tools that fit their own needs, it's not as simple as a one-time effort, sophisticated products still demand planning, iteration, and serious execution.
When more people adopt AI-assisted workflows to create digital products that fit their own needs, we will likely start seeing the same pattern we saw with IKEA furniture: recognizable sameness everywhere. In the same way IKEA became easy to spot across homes, AI-generated products are becoming easier to spot across the web. Many people have already encountered this a few times. That does not automatically make these products useless or bad; if they function properly, they can still be helpful. So where do designers sit in this equation? I believe they are among the people best suited for this new digital state. Designers already work between developers, product managers, users, and business goals, and in many companies they overlap with product thinking itself. In a talk I gave in June 2025 in collaboration with Zomra for young UX and product designers, I argued that this position makes designers especially prepared for the shift. As production becomes easier, the value of judgment, prioritization, and translating needs into usable products only becomes more important.
Solving UX problems for products is not an easy skill, and that difference becomes clear when a product moves from personal use to public use. A tool built for yourself only needs to match your own logic, workflow, and tolerance for rough edges. But a product intended for sale must work for people who do not have the time, skills, or desire to build their own alternatives. This is where experienced designers continue to matter: their value is not just in making something usable for one person, but in shaping solutions that can work for a much broader range of users. And even as designers take on more of the building process, that does not replace the need for developers. Scaling a product, maintaining it, and solving the technical problems beneath the surface still require engineering judgment that sits outside the designer's role. In that sense, design becomes even more important when the goal is not simply to build, but to build responsibly, ethically, and with a fair exchange of value.
In my view, digital industrialization is going to split designers into two broad groups. Industrialized Designers will focus mainly on producing workable UX solutions at speed, relying heavily on AI to generate output efficiently and at scale. Their work will resemble IKEA-like products: accessible, useful, and widely repeatable, but often shaped by the same visible patterns. Craftsmanship Designers, on the other hand, will treat each product with deeper attention across both UX and UI in order to create something more distinctive, more fitted, and more intentional. That does not mean they reject AI; it means they use it without letting it define the final shape of the work.
UX solutions alone may no longer be enough. In a world where AI already produces interfaces with recognizable taste and increasingly acceptable quality, visual judgment and UI skill become even more valuable. As “good enough” design becomes cheaper and easier to generate, companies will likely invest more in distinction as a way to stand apart from AI-shaped sameness. We may be entering an era where designers are pushed to raise the bar further, not just to make things work, but to make them feel unmistakably intentional.
AI is not ruining everything. Like every major technological shift, it expands what more people can do. In the same way industrial production made furniture more accessible, AI is making digital create more accessible too. It allows individuals to build ideas they might have never attempted before, and it helps designers delegate repetitive work so they can focus on more judgment, direction, and the parts of the process that matter most. The problem is not accessibility itself, but assuming that faster and cheaper production automatically leads to better fit. AI lowers the barrier to making; it does not remove the need for care.
Looking at the past, factory production drastically reduced the cost of everyday goods and allowed mass-produced items to undercut handmade work. The same pressure is now emerging in the digital world. To survive the undercut, designers will need to offer what industrialized output struggles to provide: a stronger sense of fit, better judgment, and work shaped with care rather than just speed. If AI lowers the benchmark for acceptable production, then craftsmanship becomes the way to rise above it.
Although designers are well suited for this new state of the web, that does not mean the transition will feel natural. Working with AI is still awkward for many of us, not because we lack taste, but because we are still learning how to communicate with it without letting it take over the work. That may become part of modern craftsmanship too: knowing how to involve AI, how to guide it toward better outcomes, and where to stop it from defining the final shape of a product. I have to admit that, at first, speaking to AI felt strange to me. It was not like speaking to a friend, nor like briefing another professional. These skills do not arrive in a day; they are built through repetition, experimentation, and discussion.