About a hundred senior designers and leaders from AI labs, big tech companies, and startups got together in San Francisco last week for the Design Futures Assembly . The public conversation about AI and design tends to live at the extremes: either everything is about to be automated or none of this works and we're killing the planet. The conversation in that room was different. Changing Tools, Changing Roles Almost all designers are using AI tools multiple times a week. The average number of AI tools in a designer's toolkit doubled in the last year. And that's just off-the-shelf tools. It doesn't include the ones people are building themselves. At the same time, design leaders and organizations are looking for the go-to stack: what tools should my team be using? The honest answer from the people closest to the frontier was... there isn't one. At some of the best teams, the stack is dozens of internal tools that change month to month. The muscle we all need to build might not be picking the one tool.…