Announcing our 2026 State of AI in Design Survey

Last year, we launched our first State of AI in Design report in partnership with Foundation Capital to cut through the noise and understand what’s really happening inside design teams. It became one of the most widely shared resources on AI’s impact on design work.

One year later, with the speed of AI innovation and breadth of new tools, most designers and design leaders are still navigating the same core questions: What does an effective AI-integrated workflow look like? What skills should I actually be learning? How should my team be structured?

That’s why we’re going deeper this year with our second annual State of AI in Design survey, to bring designers and design leaders concrete, usable answers.

The survey takes about 10 minutes. By completing it, you’ll be first in line for the findings and upcoming events, plus be entered to win an Oura Ring, Mac Mini, or B&W Px7 S3 headphones.

Take the survey

What survey participants get access to:

• Early access to survey findings, before they’re published publicly

• Case studies from AI-forward companies including real workflows and implementation case studies showing how leading teams actually get work done with AI

• Priority invitations to events including virtual workshops and in-person meetups

Here are some of the threads we’re pulling on in this research:

How are the best design teams using AI? Some teams have clearly moved past experimentation. We want to understand what their workflows look like and what they’re doing that others aren’t.

What can designers do now that wasn’t possible two years ago, and where does AI still fall short? The gap between idea and implementation is closing fast, but the output isn’t always good enough to use. We want to map both sides.

What does “AI-native designer” actually mean? Everyone’s using the phrase. Is it about tool fluency? Comfort with code? A fundamentally different design process? We want to pin this down with real data.

How is AI changing who gets hired, and for what? Are companies looking for different skills than they were two years ago? What’s happening with headcount? Are teams growing, shrinking, or being reshaped?

Where are organizational barriers the real bottleneck? A lot of the friction isn’t about the tools. It’s unclear policies, security concerns, lack of budget, or no permission to experiment. We want to understand how much of the slowdown is environment versus tooling.

Take the survey

This year’s report pairs survey data with video case studies from design leaders and founders reshaping how their teams work with AI - covering both the broader trends and the practical how-to’s.

If you’re a designer, design leader, or work closely with design teams, please take the survey and share it with your network. The more responses, the better the data.

- Designer Fund team

P.S. If you’re based in or heading to Austin for SXSW next week, we’re hosting an event on Saturday, March 14th alongside Framer and Foundation Capital! RSVP here.