Figma Is Preparing for a Future That Doesn't Need Figma

I’ve been working with Figma for around 7 years now and to this day, it’s still one of the tools I use every single day. But the more time passes, the more obvious it becomes to me that the thing being threatened by AI isn’t the design profession itself.

It’s the way we currently do design.

I’m not talking about AI replacing designers. That argument has been repeated way too many times already and I’m thinking about something else. I think drawing interfaces is slowly becoming a low-value activity.

If you look at today’s workflow, a huge portion of a designer’s time is spent turning an idea into actual screens.

We create wireframes, components, variants, build and maintain design systems, put together prototypes, test with a few users, then hand everything over to engineers.

But from an AI’s perspective, this type of work is almost perfect for automation. Because everything we’re doing above is basically a set of rules that gets applied at scale. Or put another way, that’s exactly what a design system already is.

More importantly, if you zoom out a little, you can imagine an entirely new product design process where AI is responsible for most of the execution. I imagine a future where designers no longer spend their days creating screens one by one.

Instead, designers focus on building a complete design language, defining how a product should work, defining experience principles, constraints, and business goals.

Then AI uses all of that to generate interfaces.

Need a new onboarding flow? AI does it. Want to test a different version of the checkout page? AI does it. Want to see how older users react to a shorter flow? You got it.

No big deal. Hahaha.

AI generates multiple variations and sends them straight into testing. At that point, designers won’t be dragging frames around in Figma anymore. Designers will spend most of their time talking to AI.

It sounds weird.

But I genuinely think that’s going to happen. A designer could spend an entire day discussing user behavior, hypotheses, conversion strategies, and experiments with AI, instead of spending the day adjusting spacing between two components.

If that happens, Figma’s role starts becoming a bit blurry. Because Figma today is built around one core assumption of designers need to manually create interfaces.

But what happens when interfaces can be generated almost instantly by AI?

I think Figma understands this very well.

That’s why I have a feeling the company is trying to move away from being just a drawing tool. They need to become the place where design systems are managed, where AI gets orchestrated & place where products get defined - not just a place for drawing rectangles on a screen.

Otherwise they’ll end up in the same position Photoshop did: it still exists & A lot of people still use it. But it’s no longer the center of digital product design the way it once was.

The interesting thing is that I don’t think designers will lose their jobs: quite the opposite.

I think the value of designers will increase, because the hardest part was never drawing interfaces. The hardest part has always been deciding what to build. Which problem should be solved, metric should be optimized & hypothesis is worth testing.

Pure UI designers probably won’t have as much room to shine as they do today. AI might even invent entirely new interface styles, the same way it can generate millions of songs flooding YouTube. And some of them are insanely catchy!!

The people who survive this shift will probably be Product Designers.

AI can generate hundreds of interface variations in minutes, but somebody still needs to decide which variation is worth creating in the first place.

Maybe in the next 10 years. Actually no, probably 5.

The most important skill for a Product Designer won’t be Figma anymore. It’ll be the ability to think about products, understanding people, asking the right questions.

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of my time vibe coding, talking to AI, and testing dozens of ideas and directions in a single week - things that would’ve taken me months or sometimes years.

And once you’ve experienced that speed, it’s hard not to wonder what this industry will look like a few years from now.