AI doesn’t make any of our disciplines obsolete. It makes our ability to work across them more important.
Years ago, a colleague said something that has stayed with me: “We are all designers, just from different perspectives.”
I’ve thought about that a lot as our disciplines have changed, split, recombined, and acquired new names.
Content strategy didn’t replace copywriting. IA wasn’t replaced by content strategy. Content design didn’t make either of them obsolete. And AI isn’t about to replace all of them.
Because they were never really competing answers to the same question. They were different perspectives on the same problem.
The copywriter sees language, voice, precision, and persuasion. The information architect sees structure and relationships. UX sees behavior, context, and interaction. Content strategy sees the larger system, purpose, and consequences. Technology sees what the system can actually do, and where it will break.
Some of the best work of my career has come from sitting with very smart people in all of those disciplines who saw something I didn’t. The connective tissue wasn’t a discipline. It was the collaboration among them.
And each time the technology changed, the problem changed shape. Websites gave us new problems of organization and findability. Content management systems forced us to think about content as structured, reusable information rather than pages. New channels complicated how we created, governed, and delivered content. Personalization forced us to think harder about audience, context, and variation.
Now AI can assemble, transform, and generate content in ways we couldn’t have imagined when many of these disciplines took shape.
But the old questions didn’t disappear.
What does this mean? How should it be structured? Who is it for? What should we say? Which source is authoritative? What happens in this context? Who owns it? What happens when the system gets it wrong?
Those are content questions. IA questions. UX questions. Editorial questions. Strategy questions. Governance questions. Technology questions.
And increasingly, they’re all the same conversation.
AI gives us extraordinary new capabilities. It also makes the consequences of disconnected thinking much more visible. A model can generate a thousand variations before lunch. It still can’t rescue an organization that doesn’t know which product description is authoritative, which claim has been approved, what its taxonomy means, who owns the source content, or whether the information feeding the system is three years out of date.
The tools change. The interfaces change. Our disciplines acquire new names and new responsibilities.
But we are still designing, just from different perspectives.
