We've been in the era of efficiency for a while now, and most of the AI conversation is still stuck inside it. The questions are all about doing the same work faster, with fewer people on the project, inside timelines that were already compressed. Those are reasonable questions, but they miss what's happening, because the real shift has almost nothing to do with efficiency.
The era that's starting is about capability. The useful question has moved from how to compress the work you already do to what new work you can take on that wasn't even possible six months ago, and what one person running a handful of agents can do that used to need a small team.
What this looks like in practice
The way this plays out in my own work is pretty concrete. I'm using agentic tools every day to build things for myself and for clients, from internal operational tooling for how I run the studio to full client deliverables that would have taken a developer and a real timeline eighteen months ago.
A good example from right now is a construction company I've been working with. I don't have a construction background and I'd never worked in the trade, but I've been using Claude on their existing data to build the kind of tooling they actually need, which is work I would have told you two years ago I couldn't do without being a domain expert first. The agentic layer takes that barrier out of the way.
The same thing is playing out on the consulting side. I'm walking into companies in industries I don't know anything about, and inside a few weeks I'm building things that solve their actual problems. The pattern recognition from fifteen years of brand and design work transfers over, and the agentic tooling closes the technical delta, so the combination lets me show up as a credible operator in places where I would have been a tourist before.
Design is how it works
The reason this works is that design thinking turns out to be the exact skill set the agentic era actually rewards. Design has always been about how things work, how a system behaves when it meets the people and the contexts it was built for, and the surface aesthetic has always been the smallest part of that. Massimo Vignelli said it years ago: if you design one thing, you can design everything.
What he meant is that the practice is universal. The same underlying moves show up whether you're designing a chair, a book, a wayfinding system, or the operating structure of a company itself. The method doesn't change. What changes is the medium.
The reason the agentic era is a design moment is that it's finally made the medium portable. If you can think about systems and people, and you can direct agents to execute inside that thinking, you can design in domains you've never worked in before, because the industry expertise gap and the time-to-ship collapse at the same time. What's left is taste and judgment, which happen to be the two things design practice has always been training people in.
Where I'm pointed from here
The brand and design work isn't going anywhere, but the more interesting problem is applying this way of working in industries I've never been in before. Right now that's construction. Whatever comes next will probably be something I don't know a thing about yet, which is the fun part. I'm excited about this phase because the way I was trained to think about problems is finally the same thing the tools let me actually do, and I'm no longer being paid for what I can draw or lay out as much as for the quality of my thinking and whether the thing it produces holds up when it hits the actual client's business.
If you design one thing, you can design everything, and the agentic era is finally making it possible to do that in practice instead of in theory. That's the career I'm building toward from here.
If you're running something in an industry I've never worked in and you want a hand on a problem that would benefit from this kind of thinking, that's exactly where my attention is right now. Reach out and let's build something.
