Kicking off a new season of Tech Connects, our new host Paul Farnsworth sits down with Amy Thibodeau, Chief Design Officer at Gusto, a platform that helps over 400,000 small businesses manage payroll, benefits, and HR functions. Amy leads product design, user research, content design, and brand design teams, giving her a comprehensive view of how AI is reshaping creative work across organizations.
We explore how AI is transforming design and creative roles—not by replacing human designers, but by accelerating workflows and blurring traditional job boundaries. Amy explains how AI serves as a "sidekick" that handles time-consuming tasks like research transcription and theme analysis, while enabling designers to focus on higher-value creative work. She discusses the emergence of "design engineers" and why traditional career swim lanes are disappearing as collaboration becomes more fluid.
Here are some quick takeaways from this discussion for tech professionals navigating AI's impact on creative and collaborative work:
Embrace AI as a Workflow Accelerator, Not a Replacement: AI excels at handling tedious, non-creative tasks like transcribing user research, analyzing themes, and creating rapid prototypes. This frees up human creative energy for problem-solving, customer empathy, and strategic thinking. Focus on identifying which parts of your workflow can be automated versus which require human insight and creativity.
Develop Cross-Functional Skills to Stay Relevant: Traditional role boundaries are dissolving as AI tools make it easier for designers to code, product managers to prototype, and teams to collaborate more fluidly. Invest in learning complementary skills outside your primary discipline—whether that's basic coding, research methods, or business strategy—to increase your versatility and value.
Prioritize Curiosity and Adaptability Over Credentials: When hiring or developing your career, demonstrate active engagement with new tools and approaches rather than relying solely on traditional qualifications. The pace of change means that specific tool expertise becomes obsolete quickly, but curiosity, learning agility, and willingness to experiment remain valuable across technological shifts.
Cultivate "Taste" and Customer-Centric Judgment: As AI democratizes creation, the ability to distinguish good work from mediocre output becomes increasingly valuable. Develop deep empathy for end users, understand business context, and build the judgment to evaluate whether AI-generated work truly solves customer problems. This human discernment represents a sustainable competitive advantage in an AI-abundant world.
There was a lot more in this episode, of course, so listen in. Thank you for joining us—and remember, Dice is your best resource to find and hire the tech talent you need to fill your open roles, and for tech pros, the best place to grow your tech career.
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