AI design consultant: make your product team AI-first without losing the craft.

Signs your team is falling behind on AI.

A few honest signals. Your designers are quietly using AI tools you never sanctioned, with no shared standards. Your competitors are moving faster and you can't quite explain how. Leadership keeps asking about your AI plan and the answers stay vague. Research and exploration are getting skipped for lack of time, even though AI could give that time back.

Or you tried a few AI tools, got mixed results, and concluded it's overhyped, when the real problem was no strategy behind the adoption. If any of those land, you're not hopelessly behind yet, but the gap compounds quietly. The cost of waiting is a team that has to catch up later, under pressure, instead of leading now on its own terms.

Getting the whole team to actually adopt it.

The hardest part of AI-first design isn't the tools, it's adoption. People snap back to old habits the moment the workshop ends. I focus on the things that make a new way of working stick: starting with the workflows people already hate so the value is obvious, building the tooling into the path of least resistance instead of bolting it on as an extra step, and setting clear standards for where AI is trusted and where it isn't.

Most of all, I make the early wins visible, so the team pulls the change rather than having it pushed on them. Transformation that lives in a slide deck is worthless. I care about the version that's still running, and still improving the work, six months later.

Who this is for.

This is for product and design teams that know AI matters but are stuck between hype and paralysis. Maybe leadership keeps asking what your AI strategy is and you don't have a real answer. Maybe your designers are already using AI tools with no standards or guardrails. Maybe you've watched competitors move faster and you can't quite see how. I help teams move from anxious, scattered experimentation to a deliberate, AI-first way of working, where the technology makes the work genuinely better and faster instead of just louder.

It works whether you're a five-person startup trying to punch above your weight or a fifty-person design org that needs to modernize without grinding to a halt. The specifics differ, but the job is the same: figure out where AI earns its place, prove it, and make it stick.

How AI is reshaping the design workflow.

AI is changing every stage of how products get made, and each stage has a trap. In research, it can synthesize interviews and surface patterns in hours instead of weeks, but it will confidently invent themes that were never there, so a human has to keep it honest. In ideation and design, it generates variations and first drafts fast, which is freeing if you treat them as starting points and dangerous if you release them unexamined.

In prototyping, it can stand up a working front-end from a description, collapsing the distance between an idea and something you can actually put in front of a user. And in production, agents can absorb the repetitive, rule-based work that quietly burns out your best people. I help your team capture those gains stage by stage, with the judgment calls kept firmly where they belong: with the humans.

What I will not do.

Plenty of AI consultants will sell you a transformation you don't need. I won't. I'll tell you where AI genuinely helps and where it's a distraction, and I'd rather build one agent that removes real pain than a dozen demos that dazzle in a meeting and die the next week.

I won't replace your designers' judgment with a model, and I won't help you push out lower-quality work faster and call it innovation. The entire point of AI-first design is leverage with the bar held high, not a race to the bottom run at double speed. If that's the kind of partner you want, we'll get along.

What an AI design consultant actually does.

Most AI consulting is slideware: a workshop, a deck, and a team that goes back to working exactly as before. I work differently. I help your design and product team adopt AI as a new material to design with, the way they once learned mobile or the web, inside the real workflow, not in a one-off training.

Concretely, that means auditing where AI genuinely speeds your team up versus where it quietly degrades quality, standing up an AI design and prototyping stack your team will actually use, building agents that remove repetitive work, and keeping humans in the loop on the decisions that matter. I set the strategy and then sit down and build the prototype that proves it.

Proof, not promises.

I built an AI agent that cut a recurring 320-hour workflow to about an hour inside a multi-billion-dollar apparel company, and drove company-wide AI adoption with dozens of early users. I authored the AI vision and roadmap for that company's executive team. See that work.

I founded Story Genie, an AI-native company where AI agents write and illustrate personalized hardcover children's books while humans supervise, live and delivering today.

I'm a designer first, so I know the difference between AI that delivers better work faster and AI that just churns out more junk. Holding that line is the entire job, and it's why teams want a designer leading their AI adoption, not a vendor.

AI-first design transformation, step by step.

It usually runs like this: understand the real bottlenecks, pick the few highest-leverage places AI helps, prove each one with a working prototype, then roll it out with training and guardrails so the team genuinely adopts it. I measure adoption and outcomes, not vibes.

The goal is never "we use AI now." It's a team that delivers better products faster, with judgment still firmly in human hands. AI that lets you push out mediocre work at twice the speed is not progress, and I'll tell you so.

Why now, and why me.

AI is the biggest shift in how products get made in a generation. The teams that win treat it as a craft to lead, not a threat to fear. The gap between good and great is no longer technical skill, it's curiosity and the willingness to build, and the people most at risk are the ones waiting for permission.

Very few people lead design at a senior level and drive AI transformation at the same time. I'm one of them, which is exactly why this combination is the work I take on. If you also need someone to lead the broader design org, see how I lead design teams.

Ways to work together.

Advisory and fractional, through my agency Surf Studios: I embed with your team to set the AI design strategy and build the first agents. Full-time, as a design and AI leader who owns the craft and the AI roadmap, see my resume. Or project work, a specific AI-assisted feature or internal tool, designed and delivered, see my agency work.