I've been working as a contractor for a while now and the SAAS company I've been in has been very chill about AI so we never had to use it unless we wanted to. We've been discussing AI tools internally but nobody in the design team felt like any of it would be useful, it's a lot faster and the quality is higher if we just keep on designing pages the classic way through Figma. Nor anyone from the higher ups thought using AI for design would make things better. Which is perfectly fine for now, but we also realised that we might be falling behind in case we need to move on to a different place.
I've had an eye on the newest developments around AI in design but I've always thought that AI ouptut is nice and cool for making concepts but in an actual company with a product it's not going to be much use. When you have to make a 8th onboarding step based on user feedback, your AI-generated music player with a forest theme won't help. I tried Claude Design and Figma Make and had a look at Google Stitch but it really felt like it's more work trying to use it than not using it all together. Sure I won't have to design my cousin's website anymore, but that's fine. In the product world there's always need for actual designers.
But now I'm not feeling so confident anymore since I have to leave my current role. I realised that hiring managers probably won't care about the day to day in the job, they want all the buzzwords and the latest tools from you. I'm thinking everybody will expect me to be using AI tools in my designs and I just don't know what and how.
So what are the actual steps of brining AI into your workflow? Do you pick a tool and plop all of your design files in there and expect output?