Design leadership in the Age of AI: Tey Bannerman on strategy, judgment, and the future of creative work

As artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes the creative industries, design leaders find themselves navigating unfamiliar territory. Generative tools can now produce visual outputs, user interface components, and even full design systems in seconds. Yet the real question for design leaders isn't "what can AI do?" It's "where do designers still matter?"

For Tey Bannerman, Lead Lecturer of the course AI Strategy for Design Leaders at the iF DESIGN ACADEMY, this moment represents a pivotal shift for the discipline. With a career that spans software engineering, product design, and nearly a decade at McKinsey & Company, where he became a Partner and led the European design practice, Bannerman has spent years advising organizations on digital transformation and pioneering early generative AI initiatives.

Today, he's helping design leaders develop the strategic frameworks needed to navigate AI’s impact on creative teams, workflows, and the value of design itself.

The strategic gap in AI education

Despite AI’s growing influence, Bannerman observed a striking gap in how design leaders are being prepared for it.

Most AI education targets engineers learning to build models or executives learning about business transformation. Creative leaders, those responsible for integrating technology into design practice and team culture, are rarely addressed directly.

“Design leaders are being asked to navigate AI strategy without the frameworks or vocabulary to do it confidently,” Bannerman explains. “Most AI education is aimed at engineers or executives. Very little is designed for creative leaders making strategic decisions.”

Apps evolve quickly. Strategic thinking, Bannerman notes, endures.

“Learning to use AI software is learning to operate a tool,” he says. “Developing an AI strategy is understanding how that tool reshapes your entire operating environment.”

The ‘tool trap’ and other strategic pitfalls

In his consulting work with organizations implementing AI, Bannerman repeatedly sees the same strategic challenges emerge.

One of the most common is what he calls the “tool trap.” Design leaders invest significant energy learning individual AI platforms, from generative image models to coding assistants, without developing a framework for when or why they should be used.

Another challenge is positioning; design leaders often struggle to articulate their value in conversations dominated by technical and financial language. As a result, their role risks being reduced to execution and delivery rather than strategic input.

“Design leaders have deep expertise in understanding human behavior and designing for trust,” Bannerman says. “But without the vocabulary to frame these contributions strategically, they get relegated to the aesthetics layer while the important decisions happen elsewhere.”

The most critical failure, however, occurs when organizations fail to distinguish between AI that augments human capability and AI that replaces it. Bannerman has seen technically impressive systems fail simply because the teams expected to use them could not trust or understand them.

Design leaders, he argues, are uniquely positioned to prevent these failures, but only if they are involved from the beginning.

As AI takes over more production tasks, the value of design increasingly shifts toward distinctly human abilities. Bannerman identifies three areas where design leadership will become more critical:

• Systems thinking – synthesizing insights across disciplines, cultures, and technologies

• Moral reasoning – navigating ethical ambiguity in AI-driven systems

• Relational intelligence – building trust with stakeholders and users affected by design decisions

He emphasizes that these are not soft skills, but some of the most demanding capabilities within organizations. “When everyone has access to powerful creation tools, the value of creation itself declines,” Bannerman explains.

Building AI strategy for design leaders

For design leaders, the challenge and opportunity lies in stepping into a more strategic role: translating between technical possibility and human reality. “The design leaders who thrive today are the ones who can sit in a room with data scientists, business leaders, and end users and help everyone see the connections they’re missing.”

In an industry being reshaped by automation and accelerated production, that ability to frame the right problems - and guide organizations through complexity - may prove to be the most valuable design skill of all.

Want to be the design leader that makes confident decisions about AI? Watch Tey’s SPARK Session: Leadership After the AI Hype.