168 / Ioana Teleanu, Designing With AI: Overcoming Barriers and Embracing Change

Ioana Teleanu is an AI product design expert and consultant who shaped the experience of Miro AI as their Lead Product Designer. She is currently the creator and instructor of AI for Designers, one of the most successful courses launched on Interaction Design Foundation. 

Moments before sitting down for this episode of Product Momentum – recorded live at ITX’s 2025 Product + Design Conference – Ioana delivered a keynote in which she invited attendees to reflect on the evolving relationship between AI and UX design. Our discussion explores the realities and myths surrounding AI’s impact on jobs, the challenges teams face in adopting AI tools, ethical considerations in deploying AI, and practical advice for integrating AI into design workflows.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

AI and the Future of Design Roles

Ioana puts to rest concerns about AI replacing product managers and designers, rejecting as “clickbait” the many recent headlines that provoke anxiety and stress in the industry.

“AI is transforming our roles, but they’re not going away,” she says. Referring to a study by the World Economic Forum, Ioana believes that “AI will end up creating more jobs than it replaces. There’s going to be more jobs thanks to AI, and one of the professions that was marked as growing is UX design.”

Addressing Challenges in AI Literacy and Adoption

Design teams face loads of challenges these days that postpone adoption and integration of AI into their workflows – many of which are rooted in decisionmaking at the organizational level.

As leaders, Ioana advises, we need to give our teams permission to play around with these tools. “Our teams are in a very odd place right now; there’s a great deal of expectation, but not a lot of support.” Company leadership needs to provide the resources – e.g., time, context, and financial support – to create the structured environments their teams need for AI learning and experimentation. “The cost of breaking things by experimenting with AI is far lower than the cost of not experimenting at all,” she concludes.

Ethics and AI’s Missing Moral Compass

Ioana reflects on society’s gradual relaxation of privacy boundaries, noting that people frequently share intimate information with AI systems that they keep even from their loved ones.

“AI doesn’t understand consequences,” she says. “It doesn’t have a moral compass. As designers, that means the responsibility is even higher on our side to protect our users and to keep their data safe.”

Final Thoughts

• Contribute to the public disambiguity. AI technology is infant technology. We’re all trying to find the answers. If you do something interesting, talk about it.
• Context (in prompt writing) Is Key. Train AI tools on specific design systems or product aesthetics to improve consistency and reliability.
• Synthetic users. They may never replace real users, but they might help UX researchers get a quick sense of something before we test with real users.
• The (Blurring) Line between Product + Design. Catch Ioana’s real-life example of a product manager (trained in Design) who initiated company-wide Figma training for product managers.

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