Designers driving organization-wide AI adoption
Public domain rocket launch image (left) and a code excerpt from John Donmoyer (right)
Who do you want to see driving AI adoption at your company? What if it could be designers?
Designers like Erika Flowers and John Donmoyer know that design does not exist in a vacuum.
As we design professionals struggle to figure out what AI means for the way we work, our partners across our organizations–PMs, engineers, and more–are all trying to answer the same questions:
Where should I be adopting AI in my work, and where should I be pushing back?
Will AI enable the “democratization” of my role, and is it a good thing or not to have more cooks in my kitchen?
Where can my team show big, impressive impact from adopting AI (AI-enabled moonshots, if you will)?
In other words, we want to understand systems-level impact: how AI will change how we work ourselves, and how it will change the way we fit into the rest of our organization.
This is fundamentally a systems design problem.
John Donmoyer is a system admin-turned-designer who now builds tools for software developers. John is one of those rare professionals who bridges two disciplines–design and engineering: in his hands, vibecoding tools become a lot more robust, allowing him to generate even production code. John shows how designers can navigate the complexities of AI-generated code, partnering directly with developers and making it easier for the entire product team to experiment with interface designs.
Erika Flowers comes at AI adoption from a different angle. When you hear about AI adoption at NASA, you expect rockets or robots. But when Erika conducted a series of internal workshops, she discovered the reality is much more relatable. Like every other organization, there are leaders and laggards in emerging tech adoption, and often your biggest wins are not moonshots, but figuring out where AI can help those in a more supporting role.
Both Erika and John show how designers are taking the lead in AI adoption, helping designers and non-designers alike to envision new ways of working. And they each offer a blueprint for how to do this at your own organization, whether it’s a small startup, or a sprawling organization like NASA.
I’ve been working with John and Erika to prepare for Designing with AI 2025. You can hear more from them both there.
Where could you use more systems thinking with AI at your organization?