For most of my nearly three decades teaching design at Parsons School of Design, there was a relatively straightforward answer to the question of what made a young designer valuable: technical proficiency. Students needed to know how to draw, construct, render, prototype, photograph, present, and eventually master whatever digital tools were transforming the profession. The tools changed constantly. The underlying expectation did not. Then AI arrived. Today, a designer can generate polished images, presentations, variations, and even entire visual directions in minutes. The ability to produce is becoming abundant—and when production becomes abundant, something else becomes scarce. Judgment. This shift has consequences far beyond design schools. It should change how organizations hire designers, evaluate creative work, cultivate junior talent, and structure the creative process itself. The organizations that adapt will not be those that simply give designers better AI tools. They will be the ones that understand that the value of a designer is increasingly determined before anything gets made. The competitive advantage has moved upstream Five years ago, I might have told a design student that mastering Adobe Creative Suite, CLO3D, Rhino, or another emerging tool would help determine their future. Technical proficiency was one of the clearest ways to distinguish yourself. Today, that advice is outdated. AI can generate countless design variations almost instantly. Beautiful images are no longer scarce, and therefore they are no longer much of a competitive advantage. What matters more is knowing which image is worth making in the first place. This is not simply a design-industry phenomenon. Across organizations, AI is making it cheaper and easier to produce content, analyze information, brainstorm alternatives, and complete tasks that previously required substantial human labor. But design provides an especially useful lens because designers have always worked at the

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