‘AI imagineer.’ ‘Design crafter.’ ‘Builder.’ Why design is suddenly full of Frankenjobs

FastCompany: Across job listing sites over the past few months, you might have noticed something curious. Alongside traditional titles like “designer,” “engineer,” and “product manager,” a new crop of roles is appearing. They have names like “designer engineer,” “builder,” or “design crafter,” and they represent a tipping point in the design industry that’s just beginning to play out. That tipping point is captured in the second annual AI in Design report, published by the investor firm Designer Fund and the venture capital firm Foundation Capital.

This year’s report draws on a survey of over 900 designers across 60+ countries, including partners like Stripe, Framer, Linear, Notion , Sierra, Shopify , and Anthropic . According to Ben Blumenrose, the managing partner of Designer Fund, last year’s inaugural survey showed that designers were beginning to experiment with artificial intelligence . Just a year later, it’s become integral in nearly every designers’ workflow—and it’s rewriting the definition of “designer.” “For the past two decades, the way we built software was the same for the most part,” Blumenrose says.

“Someone came up with a concept of what they wanted to build, they’d work with a PM [project manager] to figure that out, they’d bring on a designer to give the visuals to that thing, then pass it to the engineer to build.” Today, he explains, AI is rewriting the process. “We’ve started seeing that there’s a shift. It’s happening quickly, and it’s quite big,” he says. Ultimately, Blumenrose says the data shows that the concept of a “designer” is getting blurrier, but at the same time, it’s a role that’s more important than ever.

New year, new tools Over the past year, the design industry has undergone a paradigm shift in how it views the utility of AI. Where AI tools were once viewed as assistants for brainstorming and ideation, they’re now integrated into nearly every part of the design process. In the 2025 report, only 54% of AI in Design survey respondents said that they were using AI more than once a week. This year, 91% of respondents reported using it multiple times a week or every day.

[Image: Foundation Capital] “I think we almost forget how quickly this has taken over and become a staple of our day-to-day work,” Blumenrose says, adding, “AI shifted from enhancing a few parts of the process to being instrumental in almost every part of it.” A greater reliance on AI tools among designers has also meant that tool stacks are becoming more complex. Whereas designers in 2025 used an average of three AI tools, that figure more than doubled to seven in 2026.

And, following the release of Anthropic’s Claude Code last October, Claude overtook ChatGPT as designers’ favorite general AI tool: 78% of respondents used Claude, compared with 65% for ChatGPT. Almost two-thirds of overall respondents—65%—reported using Claude Code, which due to its recent debut wasn’t even a part of the 2025 survey. Other popular tools include Figma (a favorite for design-specific tasks), Cursor (for coding), and AI notetakers like Otter and Fathom. Many design teams are moving beyond the existing tools on the market and opting to build their own bespoke, internal AI systems.

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The article discusses the significant transformation of design roles due to AI, which is highly relevant and impactful for brand strategy professionals adapting to new industry standards.