The Roundup: How AI Is F*ing Up the Creative Process — and What We Should Do About It
Here's what we're seeing as AI reshapes teams and how we work.
How AI Is F*ing Up the Creative Process — and What We Can Do About It
Claude Code and Claude Cowork have become the darlings of the tech world, and the mood across design and research teams right now is something close to giddiness. AI is turning many of us into unicorn designers — suddenly fluent across disciplines we’d spent years staying in our lanes about. Researchers are prototyping. Designers are shipping. PMs are vibe-coding their way to working demos before the designer has finished the brief.
But trouble is brewing underneath it.
We posted an observation recently on LinkedIn about the cracks we were beginning to see in the creative process, and the responses flooded in — from design leaders at Microsoft, CVS, Meta, Salesforce, JPMorgan Chase, and teams across the industry. What came back wasn’t just validation. It was recognition. People are watching the same things break and haven’t quite had the language for it yet.
Here are five breakpoints we’re all about to hit — and some early thinking on what to do about them.
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1. Our tools aren’t built for collaboration — and teams are starting to feel it
The AI tools we have are exquisitely good at making individuals faster. They are not built to help teams think together. The result is that everyone is accelerating in their own direction, and collaboration is quietly eroding.
Jess Holbrook, who leads UX research across Microsoft’s Copilot, Bing, and Edge products, gave this a name that stuck: massive parallel play.
“It’s like massive parallel play right now. Everyone’s doing stuff individually, and then they’re like, ‘Look at what I made!’ The response is, ‘Cool, but look what I made!’”
— Jess Holbrook, Microsoft
It’s not just that the work is happening separately. The tool stacks have fragmented too. Every person on the team is running different models, different prompts, different workflows — with no shared interface between any of it. The outputs can’t easily be handed off, reviewed, or built upon by someone else.
