By Christine Bourdon, chief design officer, Americas, Designit
Generative AI has made it easier than ever for anyone in business to design. What once required a specialist can now be done by marketers, product managers, and even sales teams with a single prompt. Design has been democratised.
This shift looks like progress. Tools previously belonging to product designers, CX strategists, or brand experience teams are now available company-wide. Campaigns, UX flows, and presentations are created without waiting for design to get involved. You can see why designers are getting nervous…
However, this democratisation comes with a big drawback: quality of work is going to become erratic. And for design leaders, the challenge is how do you make design more accessible without letting quality slip?
What democratised design really means
Democratised design doesn’t mean lowering standards, it means lowering barriers. AI and no-code tools now handle the technical aspects of creation, removing the friction between an idea and something tangible. But experience design has never been about producing something that looks finished. It’s the thinking behind it.
Real design starts with understanding needs, interpreting insight, and deciding how a moment should feel and function within the wider journey.
In this Gen-AI shift, designers become more important, not less, as their role shifts from execution to ensuring coherence – the single thread that holds the entire experience together.
So how do you make the most of democratised design, without compromising what makes great design great?
Here are five ways to preserve quality while embracing everyone’s inner designer across your business
- Build guardrails, not gates
The initial response to democratised design is often control. What about approvals, checkpoints, locked-down brand assets. An overly enthusiastic sales rep in Canva let loose in Canva, will bring any design lead out in a cold sweat. But in a world where anyone can create, trying to gatekeep design only slows an organisation down.
That’s why design leaders need guardrails. It’s better to structure smartly than control tightly. Reusable components, such as templates and design systems, can help the right decisions be the easiest ones to make.
Guardrails preserve the integrity of the experience without removing the autonomy from the people closest to the work. When the ecosystem itself is designed well, non-designers can contribute without accidentally diluting the brand, and designers are able to better focus on strategy.
Guardrails enable creativity by ensuring that anything created still ladders up to one coherent experience.
- Create a shared definition of quality
One of the biggest risks of democratised design is that quality becomes subjective. Without shared criteria, every team optimises for something different. But design can’t be governed differently across departments, it has to be universal.
Design leaders need to make quality objective by clearly defining what ‘good’ looks like. What does frictionless onboarding feel like? What signals consumer trust? What makes a campaign on-brand?
When quality is defined at the experience level, design becomes something the organisation can align around.
- Use AI for acceleration, designers for strategy
AI’s generation at speed is not the same as strategy. While it can generate a design in seconds, it can’t decide whether it’s the right one and why. Its value lies purely in speed.
Trained designers bring something no tool or other department can replicate: the ability to translate insight into experience. They understand behaviour, can see how one moment influences the next, and how every touchpoint affects trust, emotion and perception.
Marketing can optimise a message, product optimise a feature. Designers optimise the whole experience across stakeholders. In this model, AI accelerates output and designers elevate the outcome.
- Layer design access based on responsibility
Democratised tools don’t mean ownership is also democratised. Not every team needs full (or any) creative control, and not every experience carries the same level of risk.
Internal materials or quick prototyping experiments can largely be template-driven. Whereas brand-defining or customer-facing moments require design oversight.
By giving different levels of access based on responsibility, not enthusiasm, organisations protect critical experiences without slowing down every day work.
- Invest in design literacy across the organisation
For democratised design to work, people need to understand the impact their decisions have on the experience – even if they never open a design tool. When teams recognise how small choices influence trust, clarity, and perception, they make better ones.
Design leaders shouldn’t have to defend themselves on every project; a design-literate organisation protects those standards on its own.
When people appreciate the value of the experience, they automatically respect the expertise required to shape it.
So, who does the future of design belong to?
Design isn’t becoming less valuable because more people can do it. It’s becoming more valuable because more people are doing it without the context to do it well.
That’s why democratised design demands design leadership. Otherwise, organisations risk ending up with a sea of well-meaning but disconnected micro-experiences with each one fine on its own, but collectively eroding trust and diluting the brand.
Everyone designing is not the same as everyone designing well.
The future of design belongs to organisations that empower contribution from all, but trust designers to guide the overall direction. The tools may now be available to everyone.
But design judgement is not.
The convergence of tech and brands 