Yeah, I get it if you cringed in disbelief at that title. 

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But let me cook for 1,000 words or so before you get the pitchforks. 

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I don't live under a rock — I know the discourse around our discipline is grim. Major tech companies have shed UX writers and content designers in waves. LinkedIn is full of hot takes about AI "replacing 70% of UX designers" within twelve months. Every other day someone shares a screenshot of a founder bragging he replaced two designers with a ChatGPT subscription and a Framer account. Ick. 

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But I firmly believe that if you've spent your career thinking about structured information, editorial strategy, messaging architecture, and system design, you are positioned to win in the age of AI more so than any other role in tech. 

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The last few years have felt like a juicy "told you so" moment for the folks who've been doing this work since we were called "content strategists" and "information architects." 

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Let me tell you why. 

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1. When outputs become cheap, inputs become invaluable

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I remember being a junior content strategist at SapientNitro (anybody remember that name??) on a client account where I was told to define editorial strategy and NEVER write a line of actual copy. At the time, this irked me. "Strategy" was such a fluffy term — and why was this client paying eye-popping money for my ethereal "editorial guidelines" deck and way less for a copywriter's actual writing? 

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Frankly — because strategic thinking is one of the most human and differentiated things we can produce. When editorial and content strategy is intentional, informed, and detailed, it makes an entire experience come to life. It quite literally humanizes it. A group of design leaders at some of the biggest names in tech right now recently got together in SF to discuss how AI is changing the discipline of design leadership. Guess the first word they settled on to describe the shift. Editorial. 

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What we're seeing realized across nearly every discipline in tech is that taste and judgement and strategy, these very fluffy and very human conceptualizations, actually do matter quite a bit. Industries like publishing, fashion, and entertainment have known that for a very long time, and now tech, which has worshiped at the altar of strict, tangible outcomes for a very long time, is finally catching up. Imagine telling Anna Wintour to demonstrate how her taste and judgement for Vogue map cleanly to an OKR. That's what trying to codify "taste" feels like in the industry right now. We can all point to this ethereal, human something in the mix, but it seems to defy clear definition. Or when we think we get it, it just evolves and changes. Remember purple gradients? 

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And now that anybody can arguably build anything (more on that below), the key question isn't "can we build this thing?" and it's not "should we build this thing?" — it's "Is building this thing, in this exact way, at this exact time, going to make us more coherent as a brand and product system, or create dissonance?" 

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Content strategy became content design over the years because we got valued for our outputs more than our inputs — even though we always knew the inputs are where the magic is. Then generative AI came along and put that whole "evolution" back in question. 

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So nobody's going to say it to the veteran content strategists, but I will: congrats folks — we were correct the entire time when we were trying to sell C-suites strategy over just strings! 

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And do you know who's going to save us from the websites and apps that all now mysteriously have the same punchy, grating, em-dash-littered tone of voice? It is you, my content friend. 

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Not as the content designer of 2014–2024 who shows up saying "I'm here to produce UI strings," but as the content strategist of yore who shows up like a phoenix from the ashes and says "I'm here to design the content and context harness our generative AI systems use to produce work that's differentiated, ownable, and coherent — with system prompts, eval frameworks, golden datasets, and a whole lot more." 

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2. Content designers finally have a path to full-stack interface ownership

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For years, content designers have been "asking for a seat at the table" — the eng/product/design triad as an equal stakeholder. 

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Sometimes, with the right partners who really got editorial strategy, this worked wonderfully. But total equality, in my opinion, has really always been a pipe dream. We were trying to be equal to functions with way more resources and a distinctive output "lawn" that they owned. When you combine that with rapid iteration culture, you get: 

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"Hey, we'd love to include you in early strategic conversations, but it's too many cooks in the kitchen, slows us down, and feels duplicative — so we'll just get you when we actually need your output, k?" 

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Well, no longer. Because AI just chopped up everyone's perfectly defined and manicured lawns and turned them into a collective campground for "builders." 

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PMs are making mocks. Designers are shipping code. Engineers are generating designs (!!). Which means — guess what, content designer? You can do all of those things too. Have Claude write a PRD. Ship a code change with Cursor. Generate Figma mocks using your design system. 

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A hill I'll dramatically die on: with generative AI tooling hooked up to an appropriate design system, a content designer can now produce a UX output comparable to that of a product designer at the same level. 

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Because what set us apart from our product design counterparts all these years was never the soft strategic and judgement skills — it was the hard executional skills. Literally going into a Figma file and constructing the mocks and the prototypes. Aka, the part of the work that just got automated. 

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And yes, we all (mostly) still have specialized titles right now. And AI doesn't make up for decades' worth of judgement refinement and skill. You can make a PRD, but it's probably not going to be as good as the one a PM with a decade of experience in the field makes. 

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And that's ok. Because I think the real wonder behind AI tooling is democratization, not replacement. Aka, you're not trying to take your product designer or PM's job (unless you DO want to make a formal switch, and if so, go for it!), but you are trying to become accountable to more specific outcomes alongside these folks so that you can all feel great about what you're building together. 

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On the builder campground, you're no longer relegated to a tiny unappreciated lawn named "literal strings in a Figma mock." The entire pasture is yours to peruse so long as you let your colleagues know where you're going and why. 

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3. The layoffs are real. But they're an awkward middle, not an end state.

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I haven't forgotten what I said up top. I'm not going to pretend the layoff data is fine. It's been fucking brutal. 

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But here's my take: we're in the awkward middle of a transformation, not the end of one. Gartner already predicted that half of all companies that cut customer service staff for AI will rehire them by 2027. My bet is content design sees a similar correction. 

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Some CEOs are cutting because of genuine financial pressure. Others just want to be known as "AI-native." I'll spare you my comments on the latter category. They're exactly what you think they are :). 

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When the corrective hiring comes, those roles may not be called "content design." Even if they are, expectations will look very different. Language designer. Language architect. Narrative designer. Model designer. Member of design staff. All real titles hiring on LinkedIn right now, all of which sound a lot like today's content designer plus dedicated AI capabilities. 

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Thank God we never officially settled that title debate, right? 

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How do you actually ride this wave?

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Get building with AI. Make something cool, at work or in your spare time — a website, an app, a set of mocks, an agent. Doesn't matter. The point is to get familiar working in spaces that aren't just strings in a Figma file. When you make something gross — and you will — get feedback from peers in visual design, interaction design, PM, and engineering. That's how you develop the generalist-builder muscle. 

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If you're employed in content design right now, start talking with your colleagues and manager about expanding your remit a bit more. Is there an opportunity for you to be the dedicated product designer on a feature coming up? Can you help the engineering team design an eval framework or a system prompt for a generative AI experience? What if you grabbed coffee with a PM you respect and showed them your thoughts about what we should build next, and why? 

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What is almost certain is that nobody is going to come to you and ask you to do these things. That's not due to ill intent, but because every role in tech is trying to figure out what they should do next and how they should grow and evolve. Everyone's thinking about themselves right now, and you should be, too. 

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Embrace that uncertainty even as your biology pushes you toward false certainty and safety. Safety and certainty are always illusions, my friend. It feels cozy and easy to think "I'm the person who writes the strings in the mocks" and way scarier to admit "Well, I could probably be accountable for whatever I want to be, provided I ask and get the right buy-in." 

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Knowing something front-to-back is stagnation. Not-knowing, being confused, and feeling a little afraid is the ground of transformation. Right now, we're all sort of being forced into that transformation, and the best, most abstract advice I could offer you is move with it and not against it. 

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You may be surprised at who you become — and what you end up making — on the other side. 

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Photo credit: Cheng Lin via Unsplash