AI and Design

Copilot Redesign, Is AI ever Done, Amazon Proteus, Miro's Head of AI Design Mark Boyes-Smith

Dan and Nik dig into Microsoft's sweeping redesign of 365 Copilot , transforming the prompt box into a task-aware workspace, leaning into progressive disclosure, and positioning AI as an embedded layer across Word, Excel, and Outlook rather than a bolt-on feature. They also discuss Jeff Gothelf's argument that "done" means something fundamentally different for AI products, where probabilistic outputs require teams to write acceptance criteria as distributions and build failure triage into launch rather than after. Rounding out the news: Amazon's Proteus warehouse robots can now take natural-language direction from human workers, and a Salesforce designer shares how her team is mastering AI tools through peer-to-peer learning, a dynamic that gives Dan flashbacks to the early days of the web. Then Nik sits down with Mark Boyes-Smith, Head of AI Design at Miro, for a deep look at how one of the world's largest collaboration platforms is integrating AI at every layer. Mark walks through Miro's new Sidekicks and Flows features, including voice interaction and custom connectors, and talks candidly about how his distributed design team rapid-prototypes in code, branches and remixes ideas, and builds conviction before shipping. He also shares his thinking on designing for long-running agentic tasks, the coming challenge of multi-agent orchestration on an infinite canvas, and what resilience and "product taste" mean for designers navigating an era of relentless change. LINKS Microsoft Copilot 365 Redesign https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2026/05/28/introducing-a-new-design-for-microsoft-365-copilot/ [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2026/05/28/introducing-a-new-design-for-microsoft-365-copilot/] What “done” means when you’re shipping AI features https://jeffgothelf.com/blog/what-done-means-when-youre-shipping-ai-features/ [https://jeffgothelf.com/blog/what-done-means-when-youre-shipping-ai-features/] Amazon's new Proteus warehouse robot https://www.engadget.com/2187338/amazons-new-proteus-warehouse-robot-is-fully-autonomous/ [https://www.engadget.com/2187338/amazons-new-proteus-warehouse-robot-is-fully-autonomous/] Designing how designers master AI https://uxdesign.cc/designing-how-designers-master-ai-642d8751d945 [https://uxdesign.cc/designing-how-designers-master-ai-642d8751d945] New Miro Features at Canvas26 https://www.youtube.com/live/qM-KxCr4I5I?si=HGtSokg95B9kO5k9 [https://www.youtube.com/live/qM-KxCr4I5I?si=HGtSokg95B9kO5k9]

Figma and Stitch Updates, Design Memory, Fraude Design, Quilter CEO Sergiy Nesterenko

Updates to Figma and Google Stitch https://www.figma.com/blog/figma-make-now-on-your-local-code [https://www.figma.com/blog/figma-make-now-on-your-local-code] https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-labs/stitch-updates/ [https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-labs/stitch-updates/] The Design System Advantage is Memory https://learn.thedesignsystem.guide/p/the-design-system-advantage-is-memory [https://learn.thedesignsystem.guide/p/the-design-system-advantage-is-memory] Fraude Design https://fraude.design/ [https://fraude.design/] Nik's Interview with CEO of Quilter, Sergiy Nesterenko https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergiynesterenko/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergiynesterenko/] https://www.quilter.ai/ [https://www.quilter.ai/]

Figma Design Agent, 2026 AI in Design Report, Synthetic Customers, Llewyn Paine on UXR

This week we talk about Figma's new design agent integrated right on the canvas, the 2026 State of AI in Design Report, and Bain's experiment with synthetic customers. Then Dan interview Llewyn Paine about the future of UXR and design and gives a preview of the Rosenfeld Designing with AI Conference 2026 https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designing-with-ai/ [https://rosenfeldmedia.com/designing-with-ai/] Show Notes: * The Figma Design Agent is Here | Figma Blog [https://www.figma.com/blog/the-figma-agent-is-here/] * State of AI in Design [https://stateofaidesign.com/] * Synthetic Customers Earn Their Stripes | Bain & Company [https://www.bain.com/insights/synthetic-customers-earn-their-stripes/] * https://www.linkedin.com/in/llewyn/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/llewyn/]

AI Originality, Bolt-on AI, Special Guest: Fin's VP of Product Design Thom Rimmer

When you collaborate with AI on a piece of work, whose thinking is it, really? That question runs underneath what a lot of designers and creatives are arguing about right now, and this week on AI and Design, Nik and Dan dig in. We start with Giorgio Schirò's "The thinking was never just mine," which uses Andy Clark and David Chalmers' "extended mind" theory to argue that creativity has always been distributed: our taste comes from books, films, teachers, and a thousand inputs we don't normally count. AI doesn't invent this loop; it just makes it faster and leaves receipts. Then we turn to Revanth Krishna's "Don't Simply Bolt On AI, Rethink From the Ground Up," using Anthropic's new Claude for Small Business as a worked example of what AI-native enterprise software might actually look like — and what trust and brand mean when the AI inside your tool isn't built by the company whose name is on the box. Our guest is Thom Rimmer, VP of Product Design at Fin. Thom tells the story of how his company decided, over a single weekend in late 2022, to bet the entire business on AI and rebuild from the ground up. We get into what that did to the org: 95% of PRs now authored by Claude Code, designers shipping production code, the design system's source of truth moving from Figma to markdown files, and what's left of the design job when the artifacts get cheap. LINKS UI for AI https://uiforai.design [https://uiforai.design] The Thinking Was Never Just Mine https://uxdesign.cc/the-thinking-was-never-just-mine-9b73cc04c837 [https://uxdesign.cc/the-thinking-was-never-just-mine-9b73cc04c837] Don’t simply bolt on AI. Rethink from the ground up. https://uxdesign.cc/dont-simply-bolt-on-ai-rethink-from-the-ground-up-ae73a9093cd2 [https://uxdesign.cc/dont-simply-bolt-on-ai-rethink-from-the-ground-up-ae73a9093cd2] Introducing Claude for Small Business https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-for-small-business [https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-for-small-business] Operator https://fin.ai/operator [https://fin.ai/operator]

Cognitive Surrender, Speed isn't The Bottleneck, and special guest PM Thomas Groendal

Wharton researchers fed people AI-generated answers, half of them deliberately wrong. The participants accepted them 73% of the time — and their confidence went up. They're calling it "cognitive surrender." Nik and Dan dig into what separates it from plain old cognitive offloading, and the design moves that might pull people back. Then: Ethan Ding's "Claude Code Is Not Making Your Product Better," and why taste, not coding speed, is the bottleneck for product quality. Finally, Tom Groendal, Senior Product Manager at CACI's DarkBlue Intelligence Group, on what AI actually looks like inside a working product team: melting role boundaries, a "product brain" repo that doubles as institutional memory, and the new role that keeps surfacing in conversation after conversation — the context manager. LINKS Thinking - Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646 [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646] Cognitive Surrender https://addyosmani.com/blog/cognitive-surrender/ [https://addyosmani.com/blog/cognitive-surrender/] Creative Tools: The Case for Keeping AI Unfinished https://medium.com/ui-for-ai/creative-tools-the-case-for-keeping-ai-unfinished-80c601821b53 [https://medium.com/ui-for-ai/creative-tools-the-case-for-keeping-ai-unfinished-80c601821b53] claude code is not making your product better https://ethanding.substack.com/p/claude-code-is-not-making-your-product [https://ethanding.substack.com/p/claude-code-is-not-making-your-product] Obviously Awesome (book) https://amzn.to/433nIkR [https://amzn.to/433nIkR]