When I was planning a workshop session recently for students in a UI design course, I looked up job ads from leading tech companies for product designers. I found three product designer job ads from AKQA, Google, and Notion, representing a big consultancy, a big tech company, and a startup. I was surprised to find that all three ads were explicitly asking designers to know AI.
Leading tech companies today seem to want designers who can move from concepts to functional prototypes using AI vibe-coding tools such as Figma, Cursor, and Claude. Notion even describes their product as a “collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents think together”. (See excerpts from the job ads below).
I expected this skill to appear on job ads sooner or later, but I’m surprised it has already happened.
If we look more closely at the requirements, it’s interesting that they ask designers to be able to use vibe coding (AI-assisted coding tools) after the concept development phase. They’re not asking designers to be able to use AI in the design process.
This makes sense because, until the second half of 2026, GenAI tools really weren’t good enough for UI design, for example. But since the release of Anthropic’s Opus 5.5 model (which has vision intelligence) in September, and GPT’s similarly new model, I have, for the first time, witnessed GenAI tools be good enough for UI design prompting.
I wouldn’t be surprised if, 1 year from now, we’ll be seeing job ads for product designers that ask them to be able to work with GenAI tools during the design process as well.
For me, this confirms my intuition that the future is moving towards designers who can also code.
