Use the AI Transition Period to Transition Your Career

Summary: In the great UX pivot, you have 5 years to trade yesterday’s expertise for tomorrow’s relevance. Legacy UX skills won’t save you in the AI age, but cultivating agency, judgment, and persuasion will. Most importantly, now is the time to prepare for working with superintelligence, before it’s too late and you become obsolete. Don’t cling to a vanishing past.

The history of computers in general and user experience in particular can be divided into 3 eras:

1. Before AI: From 1945 until 2022.

2. Transition to AI: From 2023 to 2030.

3. Superintelligence: Starting around 2030.

We’re currently in Era Two, and even though it’s the shortest of the three, it’s salient because it’s the era we’re living through right now. We know superintelligence is coming, but it hasn’t arrived yet, so we are not yet living in a fully AI-dominated world. Now is the time to get ready for the future.

Prepare Your Career for the AI World by Inventing It

How can you get ready for the age of superintelligence, when we don’t know what it will be like? Nobody knows what few existing jobs will remain or the many new jobs that will be created, and nobody knows how companies will operate or what the optimal AI-native workflows will be.

You can’t learn from others how AI will work. No lectures, no articles (even mine!) will do. But you can find out by living the future now.

The one thing I’m convinced of is that the best way to use AI is not to optimize each individual step of current workflows, which is what most people are currently doing. Keeping the same workflow with more efficient steps could easily double productivity, but not lead to the 10x improvements AI promises.

Wireframing on stone tablets was a real pain for us back in the early days. Even if you started in UX later than I did, you still spent inordinate amounts of time on tasks that can now be done in a few seconds by AI. Even so, AIfying the individual steps of the current UX design workflow is not the way ahead. We must invent entirely new workflows. (ChatGPT)

As the pioneering UX scientist Alan Kay said as far back as 1971, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” We should embrace a proactive philosophy, because passively forecasting what is to come is less effective than actively shaping it through innovation, agency, and creative endeavor.

Be active, not passive, about inventing the Age of AI. (ChatGPT)

The future is not something that merely happens to us. Instead, the future is something malleable, subject to the influence of visionary individuals, including yourself, if you choose to accept this mission. This perspective is particularly resonant in fields such as technology, design, and entrepreneurship, where the act of creation can fundamentally alter trajectories.

Implicit in Alan Kay’s maxim is a call to agency. Rather than awaiting change or attempting to divine what might occur, you are encouraged to become the architect of change. This entails not only imagination but also the courage to act, experiment, and iterate; qualities that are central to innovation and progress. Those who take initiative and invent new paradigms are often those who define what the future becomes for the rest of us. I want UX professionals to be in this group. I’m done with AI being defined by geeks.

To “invent the future” is to embrace a posture of creative responsibility. It is an exhortation to move beyond passive speculation and to become an active participant in shaping what is to come. In doing so, one not only predicts the future but, more importantly, brings it into being.

Bottom line, to have a great career in the Age of AI, you must invent the way to use AI in your career. Nobody can tell you how to do this, because nobody knows yet. If you wait for other people to invent the future, you will be irreparably behind: in perpetual catch-up mode.

The beauty of this situation is that, exactly because nobody knows how to do UX with superintelligent AI, you have the opportunity to leapfrog all those laggards who wait for things to clarify. By 2030, the only way to have 5 years of experience with AI is to have started in 2025.

Abandon Legacy UX

The one thing that’s certain is that future UX will be drastically different than legacy UX. You should abandon that ship immediately.

Do not let the Ghost of UX Past chain you down with legacy methods during the current transition period. Remaining old-school is the one sure way to be outdated as the world changes. (ChatGPT)

ADPList’s newsletter recently ran an article about an intriguing thought experiment: Would you accept a 50% pay cut for a role that promises 5x growth in skills, exposure, or future salary within the next 3–5 years? The answer obviously depends on the person’s career stage: a few years before retirement, there’s insufficient time to recuperate the loss.

Similarly, if you, Dear Reader, are at the end of your career, you should stick with those legacy UX methods you know so well. They will still be needed during these next 5 years of the transition period, and it won’t matter if you become unemployable after 2030 because you’ll be playing golf anyway.

For somebody in an early career stage, the answer should be “yes.” Do focus on the future, not the past. However, there’s a twist in the tale: the promised skill growth is irrelevant if you will be learning legacy UX skills.

Let me take myself as an example: I am arrogant enough to believe that I am a great expert in the way usability used to be done, and I used to pride myself on my 42 years of experience with these methods. I’ve trained many a skilled UX specialist over the years. But today, you would be ill-advised to become my apprentice, even if I could teach you everything I know.

The analogy is being the apprentice of the world’s greatest mammoth hunter when agriculture was being introduced. Learning the hunting trade would serve you poorly when the way to acquire food changed to staying put on the farm and growing it, rather than running around to chase down prey. Becoming the next great mammoth hunter is a sure way to be irrelevant in a farming village.

I am the equivalent of an extremely skilled mammoth hunter at the dawn of agriculture. Learning all the tricks of that old trade by apprenticing yourself to a great hunter will serve you poorly in a community of farmers, where it’s more important to know how to plough a field. (ChatGPT)

We know that farming is coming — or to return from the Stone Age to the present, we know that AI is coming, even if we don’t know exactly how the AI-enabled workflows will be. It doesn’t matter how much better you become at the handcrafted methods that are going away.

Any time you spend on legacy UX is time you don’t spend reinventing yourself for the AI future.

Don’t delay. You snooze; you lose in the game of AI transition. (ChatGPT)

Returning to the ADPList question: I recommend that you pursue a job at an AI-native company at almost any cost. Many of those startups may go out of business and leave your stock options worthless, but your experience will be worth very big bucks. If you can’t land one of those few jobs, the second-best advice is to join an AI-first company, or at least a UX team that’s AI-forward.

The difference between these terms:

• AI Native: A new company that was started from scratch with the assumption that AI infuses everything it does, from internal processes to its products or services.

• AI First: A legacy company that has pivoted to emphasize AI as the most important element in how it evolves its internal processes and its products. This will never be as good as being AI Native, because of inertia and internal resistance from people who excelled at the old ways.

• AI Forward: This is more commonly a characteristic of a team or department with enlightened management than of an entire company. AI Forward simply means that there is management support and budget for experimenting with AI tools (even expensive ones such as ChatGPT Pro) and that management looks favorably on changing processes and products to include AI when such experiments are fruitful. However, they are also fine with sticking with legacy processes and products for the duration.

Three different AI strategies. Any of them is better than working in an AI-denying team, but the tighter AI is integrated with everything, the more you will learn and the more you will grow your future career. (ChatGPT)

To conclude my Stone Age analogy: you can continue hammering stones or you can take the AI rocket ride. (ChatGPT)

The 3 Job Skills for the AI Era: Agency, Judgment, and Persuasion

I don’t know the exact AI-enabled UX workflow for the age of superintelligence. If you follow my advice and spend the current transition period on transitioning your career, you will be among the people who invent the next way of doing UX.

If you join our AI future now, you can draw this new world. (ChatGPT)

However, I am fairly sure of some general characteristics of the new world of UX:

Teams will “pancake,” by which I mean that they will flatten and become smaller, with fewer levels of hierarchy. The extreme efficiency of each AI-enabled team member means that we’ll need fewer people. This means that chasing the management ladder as your sole goal for career advancement will be a lost cause, or at the very least, very dangerous. Very few people will land positions as Director or VP of UX.

Previously, I outlined my advice for future-proofing education when we don’t know what the jobs of tomorrow will be. Future-proofing your career will be similar and involve the 3 core human skills in an age where AI will do all the low-level tasks that used to consume our time:

• Agency: As the Silicon Valley saying goes, “you can just do things.” But most people don’t. They sit and wait to be told. People with agency will be the most valuable employees in the future. AI will do as it’s told, and better than you could do. If you pride yourself on great visual design, AI will make prettier screens. If you are good at user testing? AI will have better insights. And if you’re a writer? Forget about it. But even as AI does all these things, and more, better than humans ever did, it still has to be told what to do. That remains your job.

• Judgment: Not only will AI do everything better than humans, it will do more of it. It won’t just design one screen. It’ll create 10 different mockup variations in a jiffy. Ideation is free with AI. Which of these should you ship? That’s a judgment call, and still the remit of humans.

• Persuasion: The world is made of humans, you see; and influencing others is the key to be free. (To quote two lines from my song.) Regardless of how much AI we have, and regardless of what percentage of the work is done by AI, we still live and work in groups with other people. Even if you have awesome agency and superior judgment, nothing will happen unless other people buy into your ideas and recommendations. Excelling at persuasion is the only way to have a great career in the future, as the old so-called “hard skills” become irrelevant.

The 3 job skills of the future. (ChatGPT)

Remember, we still have about 5 years before everything old becomes totally irrelevant. For now, it may seem as if you can coast on your old experience and skills. But around 2030, they will be the equivalent of being an experienced mammoth hunter. (Or, with a more recent analogy, like being a blacksmith with great skills at making horseshoes.)

Now is the time to pivot. Use the transition period to transition, while you still have some slack.

This has happened many times before in human history, and we’re at such a turning point again: time to abandon what you know and learn to thrive in the future. (ChatGPT)

About the Author

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a usability pioneer with 42 years experience in UX and the Founder of UX Tigers. He founded the discount usability movement for fast and cheap iterative design, including heuristic evaluation and the 10 usability heuristics. He formulated the eponymous Jakob’s Law of the Internet User Experience. Named “the king of usability” by Internet Magazine, “the guru of Web page usability” by The New York Times, and “the next best thing to a true time machine” by USA Today.

Previously, Dr. Nielsen was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer and a Member of Research Staff at Bell Communications Research, the branch of Bell Labs owned by the Regional Bell Operating Companies. He is the author of 8 books, including the best-selling Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity (published in 22 languages), the foundational Usability Engineering (28,628 citations in Google Scholar), and the pioneering Hypertext and Hypermedia (published two years before the Web launched).

Dr. Nielsen holds 79 United States patents, mainly on making the Internet easier to use. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Human–Computer Interaction Practice from ACM SIGCHI and was named a “Titan of Human Factors” by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

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