In my previous article about 'the last mile' of design, I explored the technical challenges of turning AI-generated prototypes into production-ready systems. But there's an equally important story to tell - not about the technical journey, but about the human one. While AI revolutionizes how quickly we can create and iterate, it's making human judgment, taste, and strategic thinking more valuable, not less.
Think of the California Gold Rush of 1849. While everyone was focused on finding gold, the real fortunes were made by those who understood the deeper infrastructure needed - the people who sold picks, shovels, and supplies. We're seeing a similar pattern with GenAI. While many chase the flashy outputs of generative AI, the real value lies in the human excellence layer - the strategic thinking, creative judgment, and deep experience that transforms AI's raw outputs into meaningful products.
The New Bottleneck Isn't Technical
While AI tools can now help us rapidly generate prototypes and code, the real bottlenecks in product development haven't changed – they’re still on the human side. The ability to rapidly generate options doesn't solve the challenge of choosing the right option or implementing it successfully at scale.
AI is great at generating things that look like solutions rapidly, but the true value of human-led product design lies in the nuanced understanding of user needs, brand storytelling, and empathic design. Great products aren't just technically sound – they tell stories, create connections, and solve problems in ways that feel delightful, or simple, or even better, both. We look to create feelings like “huh… that was easy” in our users. When we look at successful digital products, it's rarely the technical implementation that sets them apart, but rather the thoughtful micro-interactions, the careful consideration of edge cases, the emotional design elements, and the deep understanding of user context that makes them exceptional.
This human layer becomes even more critical at scale. Enterprise solutions need to balance technical capabilities with organizational culture, accommodate diverse user needs, and maintain consistency across complex systems. These challenges require empathy, cultural awareness, and strategic thinking that goes beyond what AI can provide. It's about understanding the subtle differences between what users say they want and what they actually need, recognizing organizational dynamics that might impact adoption, and crafting solutions that not only work technically but feel natural and intuitive to users.
The Strategic Layer
We're seeing a new layer in the design and development process; the "human excellence layer." This isn't about pixel-perfect designs or clean code (AI is increasingly handling those). It's about the strategic thinking that turns technological capabilities into business value.
Traditional design consultancies focused on production capacity – how many designers they could put on a project, and how quickly (or slowly) they could turn around deliverables. But that model is changing. The new model needs to focus on strategic capacity – how effectively teams can identify meaningful patterns across projects, translate technological possibilities into actionable insights, and bridge the gap between technical possibilities and business realities.
Think of modern product development like a sophisticated nervous system. At its foundation, AI handles autonomous functions - processing information, recognizing patterns, adapting to different contexts, and orchestrating routine tasks. This is like our autonomous nervous system, handling countless operations without conscious thought.
Above this sits an integration layer, routing signals and managing responses between AI systems and human decision-makers. But the real work happens in the “human excellence layer”, representing our higher brain functions, where complex decisions are made and strategic direction is set.
What makes this architecture powerful isn't just the AI processing or human decision-making individually, it's how they work together. Information flows both ways: AI systems identify patterns and opportunities that inform human decisions, while human insights and choices flow back to make the AI systems smarter. Each project, each decision, and each iteration makes both layers more effective.
In practice, this means when developing new features, or products, AI can rapidly suggest approaches based on past patterns and flag potential issues, but human experts provide the crucial strategic direction, understanding of context, and innovative thinking that transforms these suggestions into exceptional products.
This architecture represents a clear shift in how we think about AI in product development. Instead of asking whether AI will replace human expertise, we should look at systems that meaningfully combine both. The result isn't just faster development or better decisions - it's the ability to create products that are both technically sophisticated and deeply human-centred.
The New Value Creation Model
There's a famous observation about the California Gold Rush of 1849: The people who made money weren’t those who went off in search of gold, it was the people who sold the picks and shovels. We're seeing a similar pattern emerge with Generative AI. While everyone is focused on the flashy outputs of GenAI, the real value lies in the foundational layers – the AI core systems, specialized agents, and integration frameworks that operate invisibly in the background.
Recently, we worked with a major tech company where the initial challenge appeared to be about creating tools for data scientists. Through deep research and stakeholder engagement, we discovered the real value wasn't in building new tools – the market was already saturated with them. Instead, it was in creating robust analytics and reporting systems that could help data scientists understand model performance, feature drift, and root cause analysis.
This type of insight doesn't come from AI - it comes from deep industry experience, stakeholder engagement, and strategic thinking. Understanding the true business and user needs was the challenge, solving that allowed us to figure out the product, and to technically solve for the users and business needs. It's about looking past the gold rush mentality of GenAI and focusing on building the fundamental infrastructure and frameworks that will enable sustainable, valuable implementation.
The Path Forward
The Human Excellence Layer is in no way new, it has always been the heart of great product design - it's where experience, intuition, taste, and strategic thinking combine to create truly meaningful solutions. What's changing isn't the importance of this layer, but how AI enables it to work more effectively and to have an even greater impact. By handling the heavy lifting of initial ideation, rapid prototyping, and variant exploration, AI tools give creators a running start, allowing us to explore more possibilities and reach initial conclusions faster.
But this is where the real work begins. Once we've used these tools to establish a foundation and achieve stakeholder alignment, our uniquely human capabilities become even more crucial. We can see beyond the obvious, understand subtle user needs, craft delightful interactions, and infuse products with a personality that transforms promising prototypes into exceptional products. Our experience helps us anticipate edge cases that AI might miss, our taste helps us elevate design beyond the algorithmic average and avoid hegemony, and our strategic thinking helps us navigate the complex realities of implementation. We can avoid the equivalent of British food in the 70s - while edible and provides sustenance, it was all a bit bland, a bit samey and no one was hugely excited by it.
The future of product design isn't about smaller teams doing less work - it's about expert teams having more time to focus on what humans do best. While AI democratizes simple creation, it also increases the value of deep expertise, refined taste, and strategic insight. The Human Excellence Layer is becoming more vital than ever as the key differentiator between good products and great ones - even as AI takes on some of the work.
AI can help us get to decisions faster, but it's human excellence that ensures we're making the right decisions for the right reasons. That's where true innovation happens, and that's what will continue to define the future of product design.
