This week we ran a UX strategy webinar at UX Tree, led by Kevin Zamora-Saenz, who also teaches our Product Strategy course, and even though we probably didn’t pick the best timing with Easter week, the conversation we had during that session is one that more people need to hear right now.

There’s still a lot of noise around AI, and most of it is focused on the wrong thing, because people keep asking whether AI will replace them, when in reality it’s already replacing parts of what they do. It can generate ideas, write content, analyse data, and speed up execution in ways that would have taken teams days or even weeks not that long ago, so pretending that this is something coming in the future doesn’t really help anyone.

What matters more is understanding where your value actually sits once those parts are no longer the differentiator.

One of the points Kevin made really clearly during the session is that you’re not going to lose your job to AI itself, but you are very likely to lose it to someone who knows how to use it better than you, and that shift is already happening across design and product teams. The advantage is no longer in doing the work faster, because AI is already better at that, but in deciding what work should be done in the first place, why it matters, and what impact it will have.

That’s where strategic thinking becomes the real skill.

What we still see a lot, especially with designers, is a gap between the work being done and how that work is explained.

Designers are very comfortable talking about journeys, research, usability, and flows, but the people making decisions in the business are thinking about completely different things, like revenue, retention, cost, and risk.

When those two sides don’t connect, design ends up being treated as execution rather than something that shapes direction, which is exactly where it becomes vulnerable.

The designers who are moving forward are the ones who can bridge that gap, because they don’t just focus on what they’re designing, but on why it matters and what it changes. They’re able to explain how a decision might reduce churn, improve conversion, or increase long-term value, and they can do it in a way that makes sense to the business, not just to other designers.

That’s also where the difference between junior and senior designers becomes much clearer, and it has very little to do with tools. In many cases, juniors are faster and more up to date, but senior designers understand context, trade-offs, and consequences, and they can justify their decisions based on evidence and expected outcomes rather than preference.

AI is only making that gap bigger.

If your value is tied to execution, you become easier to replace, because that’s exactly the part AI is improving the fastest, but if your value is in how you think, how you make decisions, and how you connect work to outcomes, then you become much harder to ignore.

There is another side to this that came up during the discussion, which is the risk of over-relying on AI without realising what it’s doing to your own thinking. When you start using it to generate ideas, structure problems, or even guide decisions, it can quietly take over parts of the process that you should still be owning, and over time that starts to show, because you stop building that capability yourself.

That’s where the real risk is.

Because at the end of the day, your value is not what you produce, it’s how you think, how you question things, and how you make decisions when things are unclear and those are the parts that AI can support, but not replace.

What we’re seeing now is a shift where it’s easier than ever to create something, but much harder to create something that actually works, delivers value, and survives in a more competitive and more cost-conscious market, which is exactly why strategy matters more now, not less.

If you’re trying to stay relevant in this environment, the answer isn’t to chase every new tool or feature that comes out, but to get better at understanding problems, asking better questions, and making decisions that connect user needs to business outcomes in a clear and measurable way.

That’s the part that doesn’t go away.

If AI took away your current workflow tomorrow, what would still be left that only you can do?

Most people don’t have a clear answer to that yet, and that’s exactly the problem.

That gap between execution and decision-making is what we focus on in our Product Strategy course at UX Tree, where Kevin Zamora-Saenz works directly with you on how to think through problems, connect your work to business outcomes, and build the kind of judgement that actually moves you forward.

If you know you need to move beyond execution and start making better decisions, not just better screens, you can join the next cohort. We keep it small on purpose so the work stays practical.