Ten years ago I did an internship in public services as a designer. I was surrounded by people from the best schools in the country, people who knew everything about policy, geopolitics, negotiation, talking in a language I couldn't follow. I was the only designer in the room.

When the tour de table reached me, I fumbled through explaining what I do. I felt like a name on the wrong list. The Secrétaire Général, the person everyone in that room respected the most, stopped the introductions. He said something I still remember:

"I want you all to pay attention to what Flo just said. He's a designer. And if you find it strange to have a designer here, you should know that tomorrow you will all work with designers in public services. They are not here to make beautiful websites. They are here to understand and solve people's problems. People, in our case, are citizens of this country."

It gave a boost of confidence to the impostor sitting in me. It also felt like a relief to see that someone around the table understood my job. I've gone where design is unexpected ever since, from public services to safety and privacy and now AI. Not because I enjoy being the odd one in the room. Because that room is always the one that needs a designer the most.

Now I work on AI, surrounded by people from the best schools in the country, people who know everything about model evaluation, business priorities, agentic work, talking in a language I often can't follow. I want to tell them that tomorrow you'll work with even more designers in AI. Designers aren't here to design the chat bubbles. They are here to solve people's problems, and AI needs this more than ever.

The designer's responsibility

Anthropic surveyed 81,000 people about AI and found something they call "light and shade." The people who value AI the most for learning are three times more likely to fear it will rot their ability to think for themselves. I spent years working on safety and privacy, and I learned that the benefit and the danger of a technology are the same capability, seen from two angles. There is no clean solution to this, only the quality of the person making the trade-off.

Designer responsibility is about being the person in the room who asks what this feature will feel like for someone who didn't choose to encounter it. It's the difference between a system that respects people and one that optimizes past them. Engineers build what works, product managers build what ships, designers build what someone will actually live with.

AI systems are reaching more people than any public service in history. The Secrétaire Général told me designers solve citizens' problems. A decade later, the citizens are a billion users and the public service is an AI. At this scale, "making the experience better" is not a product goal, it's a civic responsibility. And every designer should take it on.

You might feel lost right now

Some people take the AI turn with excitement, others with fear, others with complete rejection. Our design process has completely changed. No two designers have the same one, and nobody knows where we're going. Some designers don't use Figma anymore. They make iterations in prod and take decisions with an assistant plugged to their second brain. Static mocks are giving way to adaptive UI. Design borders are moving, and we naturally take more scope.

But design didn't change. Thinking is still the most important part of the job, and the outcome is still to find the best solution to people's problems. The process changed, but we don't really care because the outcome is the only part that matters. So if anyone feels they're being left behind: we all feel the same. Designers must have a stronger voice in AI, and they should all have the boost of confidence I had ten years ago.

Embrace the mess

In AI teams, the pace is fast, the work is always in motion, the future is unstable. But for the first time in a while, I feel like I'm exactly where I should be. Not because the technology is exciting, even though it is. Because every feature I design carries real weight: it changes how someone thinks, learns, makes decisions.

In the AI space, we have never needed designers more than we do right now. I moved to an AI team because I'd rather be in the room where the trade-offs are made. Designers are not here to make beautiful chat bubbles. They are here to solve user problems, people problems, citizen problems.