Executive Summary

The AI era demands more than technical upgrades, it requires strategic design leadership that can translate enterprise ambition into durable, differentiated value. This moment calls for design executives who can reframe design not as artifact production, but as strategic orchestration. Companies that invest early in strategic design leadership gain both internal and external advantages - stronger alignment across functions, faster execution, and more resonant customer experiences that build lasting trust.

Generative AI is not just another tool; it is already reshaping customer expectations, team structures, and the entire value chain. Yet despite the 
hype, many organizations face a familiar challenge: bridging the gap between technical innovation, viable use cases, and the design of experiences people actually want and use.

As traditional enterprise moats erode, new ways of working must rise to meet evolving customer expectations and the transformative capabilities enabled 
by AI. In this new reality, design leadership is a strategic imperative for 
enterprises serious about competing effectively in the age of AI.

Our research highlights data shared by Design Executive Council members, 
and several impact stories of how design executives from global companies 
like Adobe, Oracle, Cisco, and Google at leveraging design leadership to drive enterprise value with AI. It aims to share the strategic questions, concerns, and opportunities raised 
by design executives inside some of the world’s largest companies, each navigating how to build a more intelligent and humane future with AI. Our research is sourced from first-party data, generating first-of-kind 
insights on enterprise readiness from the design executive lens:

We survey of 25 design executives from Fortune 1000 companies, representing a combined market value exceeding $2 trillion, including Google, Amazon (AWS), SAP, Delta Airlines, Target, Oracle, JPMorgan Chase, and CBS.

Key Findings

The impact of AI on design leadership and the broader organizational landscape, as discussed by design executives, highlights both the transformative opportunities and the significant challenges that arise from the widespread integration of AI.

• Fix the Infrastructure Foundations: AI reveals deep-rooted tech debt and system complexity. Design leaders can define minimum viable experiences, prototype around constraints, and champion foundational investments, such as data quality and platform compatibility, thereby accelerating adoption and minimizing failure risks.
• Make Trust Measurable: Opaque AI outputs threaten trust, especially in high-stakes industries. Design can embed explainability, attribution, and consent into the UX, making trust visible, reducing risk, and turning transparency into a strategic advantage.
• Design for Compliance from the Start: Compliance gaps delay AI deployment and erode trust. By collaborating early with legal and regulatory teams, design leaders can build intuitive, aligned experiences that balance ethical safeguards with execution speed, thereby streamlining adoption and safeguarding brand reputation.

Reading Benefits

As AI reshapes every layer of business and design, leaders are navigating uncharted territory. This report is your strategic compass, offering clear, actionable insights from those already doing the work at scale.

1. Gain a future-ready lens on how AI is reshaping the role and responsibility of design leadership. Understand the shifts required to stay relevant and effective in a changing landscape.
2. Explore real-world frameworks from leading companies that are already integrating AI into their design processes. Learn what’s working, and how to apply it in your own organization.
3. Get clarity on how to lead with ethics, creativity, and confidence. Learn to balance innovation with responsible decision-making in an AI-driven environment.
4. Access practical guidance on org design, tooling, and the mindset shifts required to become truly AI-ready. Build the foundation for scalable, future-proof design teams.
5. Benchmark your team’s progress against others in the field. Identify what’s next for your design practice and where to focus your efforts.

We have designed this report as a source of inspiration to help designers and researchers expand their understanding of how they can shape the emerging relationship between humans and AI.

This is not just about adapting to new tools. It’s about understanding how AI now sits between our imagination, decisions, and the artifacts we create. It’s about asking: What do we want to build, and who is it really for?

As organizations integrate AI across infrastructure, operations, and strategy, the stories here offer more than examples. They reflect how leaders like you are navigating the tension between experimentation and responsibility, between velocity and values.

Use these perspectives to refine your approach to work, drive innovation that is not just novel but also meaningful, align AI with outcomes that matter, and ensure the systems we help build serve people, not just performance metrics.

This is a call to design and research not as functions, but as forces for shaping what this next era becomes.

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